Heitor Villa-Lobos (March 5, 1887 – November 17, 1959) was a Brazilian composer, described as “the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music”. Villa-Lobos has become the best-known South American composer of all time. A prolific composer, he wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works, totaling over 2000 works by his death in 1959. His music was influenced by both Brazilian folk music and by stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, as exemplified by his Bachianas Brasileiras (Brazilian Bachian-pieces). His Etudes for guitar (1929) were dedicated to Andrés Segovia, while his 5 Preludes (1940) were dedicated to Arminda Neves d’Almeida, a.k.a. “Mindinha.” Both are important works in the guitar repertory.
String Quartet No. 6 “Brazilian” (1938)
Dedicated to Orlando Frederico
1. Poco animato
2. Allegretto (6:59)
3. Andante, quasi adagio (11:38)
4. Allegro vivace (18:18)
Cuarteto Latinoamericano (Mexico City)
Villa-Lobos composed his Sixth Quartet during 1938 in Rio de Janeiro, and it was first performed in the same city by the Quarteto Haydn on 30 November 1943, on the same programme as the premiere of the Seventh Quartet. The published score bears no dedication, but the manuscript is dedicated to the violist Orlando Frederico (Villa-Lobos, sua obra 1972, 85), who many years earlier had participated in the premieres of both the Second and Third Quartets. Together with the Fifth Quartet, this work is marked by a deliberate move toward a more “popular” style, incorporating elements of Brazilian popular music, and the Sixth is regarded as the most nationalistic of all Villa-Lobos’s string quartets (Béhague 2003, 294). Villa-Lobos originally planned to designate this work as the second “popular quartet” (the Fifth Quartet is subtitled “Quarteto popular no. 1”), but in the end abandoned the idea of such a series (Béhague 1994, 123). At the same time, it is with this quartet that the references to the quartets of Haydn, which continue throughout the composer’s later quartets, become clear for the first time (Salles 2012, 94)