Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Was Villa-Lobos wrong?

A new book by conductor and scholar Roberto Duarte entitled Villa-Lobos errou? looks at the often chaotic state of Villa-Lobos's scores. According to Duarte, who has published careful studies of Villa's orchestral scores in the past (the two-volume Revisão das Obras Orquestrais de Villa-Lobos in 1994) notes that "his mind was much faster than his hands." Villa-Lobos wrote so many notes that it would have required a super-human to keep everything perfect. As Duarte says, the composer was "intensely human."

The book is trilingual: Portuguese, German, & English. I'll see if I can order it from the Great White North, and report back here. It's for sale at Algol Editora and Loja Classicos.

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