Welcome to The Villa-Lobos Website - Heitor Villa-Lobos on the web, since 1994
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A big month coming up for Villa-Lobos lovers! November 17 is the 50th Anniversary of his death in 1959. On November 18 the body of the composer was laid out on a fire department truck in the middle of the square in front of the Theatro Municipal in Rio. A choir on the steps of the theatre sang Villa's Missa São Sebastião. You can see this scene in a picture from the day, here, at the Banco de Imagens of the website of O Globo. Or at any rate, I believe that's the scene from Nov. 18 (the caption says Nov. 12, when Villa was still alive). |
CPFL Cultura 50 anos sem Villa-Lobos
The CPFL Cultura site has a special Villa-Lobos 50th Anniversary feature that includes a number of really interesting projects. The site includes descriptions, photos, and MP3 audio of concerts. Projects include:
- Villa's Voice, with the Bruce Henri Quartet
- Grupo Sonax's Villa-Lobos Landscape
- Daniel Murray's Villa em Movimento
- Projeto B's A Sagração segundo Villa-Lobos
- Um Brasileiro na Broadway, with Mauro Wrona
- Villa parisiense, with Manuela Freua and Dana Radu
- A ópera de Villa, with Eliane de Morais, Rubens Medina, Sebastião Teixeira, and Marcos Aragoni
- De Bach à Floresta Amazônica, with Sidney Molina and Edna D'Oliveira
You can download MP3s of each individual concert, or an RAR archive that includes all eight.
Festival Villa-Lobos no. 47
The forty-seventh annual Festival Villa-Lobos takes place at the Museu Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro from the 6th to the 28th of November, 2009. The Festival's Artistic Coordinator Marcelo Rodolfo has pulled out all the stops for this year's festival, which commemorates the 50th annniversary of the death of the composer on November 17, 1959.
The long list of Villa-Lobos works being performed includes some rare works: the orchestral version of the 1916 Élégie, Fantasia em 3 Movimentos (Em Forma de Choros), the Quinteto Instrumental, Choros #05 arranged for wind orchestra, and a 1912 work for winds I haven't heard of before, called Pro Pax. Concerts will also include works by other composers, especially from France, as part of the "Paris de Villa-Lobos" series.
There are two important new compositions being premiered at this year's Festival:
- Biguás (Cormorants) by Ricardo Tacuchian is a work commissioned by Sala Cecilia Meireles in honour of the 50th anniversary
- Pequena Fantasia sobre “A Menina das Nuvens” is an arrangement of themes from Villa's 1958 Fantasy Opera by Roberto Duarte
Performers include guitarist Paulo Pedrassoli, pianists Sérgio Monteiro & Sonia Rubinsky, the Quarteto Radamés Gnattali (who will perform all 17 String Quartets), the Quinteto Villa-Lobos, and many more. It's a star-studded line-up!
Here is a list of the most important concerts in the Festival.
