LDV119

‘Villa-Lobos was more of a child than any actual child’, wrote his friend Marcel Beaufils in 1963 of the figure he called ‘musicien et poète du Brésil’. His meeting with Artur Rubinstein led to the first pages of A próle do bébé , written in 1918, a set of poetic pieces evoking the world of childhood, expressed in a virtuosic, personal piano style made up of myriad picturesque details. With the Cirandas of 1926, Villa-Lobos constructed little tableaux, inserting in each of them one of the nursery rhymes that all Brazilian children learnt at school (and still learn today, in a variety of modern arrangements). His inexhaustible rhythmic creativity, his instinctive genius for creating a pianistic decor and his playfulness extract rich and authentic emotions from these ingenuous melodies.