Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1 for at least 8 cellos

Villa-Lobos's colourful and immediately ear-catching music is full of the rhythms and sounds of Brazil. The haunting soprano theme of the fifth Bachianas Brasileiras is one of the best-known melodies of all time, and the carnival atmosphere at the end of Momoprecóce is suffused with Brazilian sunshine.

Who knew that the solid, staid old Berlin Philharmonic had such a groovy group of swingers in its cello section? One of them plays the maracas during the rests in his part, others slap their instruments with abandon, and some of them even shout at appropriate moments: if this makes them sound like trainspotters letting their hair down, it's not meant to. This recording of South American and South American-inspired music is full of joy from beginning to end, and played with the kind of accuracy other ensembles only dream of. The mood ranges from sultry and sweaty (Kaiser-Lindemann's Brazilian Variations) through coolly intellectual (the Fugue from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1) to pure sunshine (Burt Bacharach's "South American Getaway"). The arrangements are models of their kind, and the cellists respond to their challenges with bravura and passion--at times creating sounds remarkably like a bandonéon, at others producing perfect harmonics in octaves or just singing out with pure joy. Irresistibly seductive.

This is our ninth CD, and it is being released in the year of our twentieth anniversary. The CD is a travelogue of sorts, containing music we picked up on tour around Latin and South America and in the US. Several of the pieces on this disc were commissioned for our visit to the Subtropics Festival in Miami – a city that is a great crossroads of Latin culture – in 1997. Other pieces we collected in foreign places or from friends we made in those places. We have brought all this music to our home base, New York, another cross-cultural gathering place. And now to listeners wherever they may be. Timbrando is Portuguese for ‘making a tone’ or ‘sounding’ (it is related to the word ‘timbre’).

Villa-Lobos was a composer of astonishingly prolific creativity, though most of his works are little-known and his discography is meagre. An autodidact, he developed a personal system of composition, inspired by Brazilian folk music (cf. Chôros VII which mixes winds and strings in a direct evocation of the streets of Rio), contemporary European music, and Bach (in the Bachiana brasileira nr. 1 which employs the special sound of an orchestra of cellos). The focal point of this record, Chôros XII, described by the composer as "strong, big and robust as an old elephant" is a monumental work that develops a structure based on variation form. Villa-Lobos displays an consummate art of orchestration. The publication Les indispensables du disque compact classique (Fayard) refers to this recording as "to be marked by a white stone: we had no idea these musicians from Liège could pick up Brazilian rhythms so naturally. A success" - one that is updated for the greater pleasure of listeners.