Villa-Lobos: Sexteto místico, 12 Estudos for Guitar & 5 Preludes for Guitar

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) and Brazilian music are so closely identified that they have become almost synonymous. Oscillating between a declared nationalism and a bursting originality, Villa-Lobos has been able to set his name (the voice of a geographical and spiritual South, different in its way of rising) and to trace the map of a tropical but at the same time universal sound universe: it is true, after all, that «in the cell of a dreamer, familiar objects become myths of the universe» (Gaston Bachelard). In Villa-Lobos connections and dislocations concoct a “mestizo” palimpsest of irresistible charm that delineates equivalences of atmospheres between the exuberant Carioco folklore and the contrapuntal rigor of Bach, between the archetypal substratum of the dances of the Indians and the luminous Europeanizing cleanliness of the guitar art of Carulli and Giuliani: the (poetic) memory of these distant worlds, unheard of in their reciprocal approach, confesses that it wants to live and as in an early twentieth-century papier collé it manifests itself and aims at a powerfully romantic, vibrant, intimate and vertical lyricism.

From the liner notes by Attilio Cantore