Updated 01/23/2024
Music can be described as a universal language, and nowhere is this more evident than in Brazil, where music melded from the unique hybrid of Portuguese, African, and Indigenous cultural traditions provides the foundation for festivals, religious rites, and everyday life. Once again, the Villa-Lobos International Chamber Music Festival will take music lovers on a journey through classical, jazz and contemporary compositions, all with a Latin-inspired twist. Coming on the heels of last week’s first of three performances, the second will be in the Winn Room this Friday, Jan. 12 at 1 pm with admittance at 12;30, and the finale at the Winn Room on Saturday, Jan. 27 at 7:30 pm with doors opening at 6:30. Both events are free with no reservations required, so come early for the best seats.
Dr. Lars Hoefs, Founder and Artistic Director of the Villa-Lobos International Chamber Music Festival, and Professor of Cello and Music History at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil, formed the Festival in 2015 with concerts from LA to San Diego as a cross-cultural link between Brazil’s rhythmically diverse music and Southern California, where he had lived and studied. The Festival’s name derives from Brazil’s most widely known and impactful composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959). Described as “the best-known South American composer of all time,” he was relegated to performing on the streets when he was just 11 years old, after the death of his father. But, by the age of 15, he was performing as a cellist in orchestras and small chamber groups and writing classical compositions. His prodigious writing and performing, along with a mastery of interweaving classical music with the ancient rhythms and structure of Brazil’s earliest primitive music, led to a swell of popularity in the Americas as well as Europe, gaining his eventual designation as a national hero.
His research of early endemic music involved living for five arduous years in the Amazon jungles, later regaling friends with tales of collecting music from cannibals. According to one such tale, he encountered a tribe of cannibals in the act of tossing a young woman into a cooking pot for the night’s dinner. Thinking quickly, he grabbed his cello and began playing so beautifully, the cannibals gifted him the woman, Lucilia, who later became his wife. Though highly skeptical of cannibal encounters, music critics nonetheless recognize the validity of his early ethnomusicology research. And, it is Villa-Lobos’s legacy of intertwining the roots of bygone folkloric tunes with classical music that secures his continued popularity and influence.
This week’s concerts will feature music by Villa-Lobos along with other South American composers. First, on Friday, the Blue Rose Trio will perform. A regular feature of the Villa-Lobos Festival, the trio actually formed in 2003 at USC when Hoefs, Rose Chen, and Karl Pasch were graduate students. Their immediate success was such that they were invited, while still in school, to play throughout Europe, Israel, and Hong Kong. Fans of the David Lynch TV series “Twin Peaks” will enjoy the fact that the trio got its name from the mysterious allusion to the show’s blue rose. The trio has since accumulated multiple music competition awards. Fresh off a tour in Brazil in June 2023 with concerts in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the group just released an album, “Brazilian Landscapes,” on the Villa-Lobos International digital label and available for streaming on all platforms.
Selections will include the work of Paul Desenne, the recently deceased Venezuelan composer whose music reflects his French, American, and Venezuelan heritage, and was influenced by the poetry of well-known Argentine poet, Jorge Luis Borges. Villa-Lobos’s Fantasia Concertante will showcase the influence of Brazil’s native folklore, followed by selections from the newly released Brazilian Landscapes album.
The Grand Room’s Finale will showcase a string quartet of highly accomplished musicians whose music will visit a variety of musical stylings from the Argentine Puna, Mexican folklore, early Brazilian jazz, and vintage Rio street music.
One audience favorite will be Alberto Ginastera’s Impresiones de la Puna, composed in 1934 and which reflects a captivation with Latin America’s pre-Colombian history, incurring images of the ancient Incan settlements that existed on the barren landscape.
Another gem is Villa-Lobos’s complex String Quartet no. 6 which, according to Hoefs, “is like walking through the streets of Rio a few decades ago.”
Don’t miss these two final opportunities to experience world-class performers playing Brazilian, Mexican, and South American compositions.
Source: Coronado Cultural Arts Commission
