It’s big. It’s loud. It’s lush. It’s exotic. It’s our old friend, Heitor Villa-Lobos back to regale us with his own special brand of extravagantly expressive, orchestrally brilliant, melodically captivating Brazilian musical magic. This second installment in CPO’s ongoing traversal of the complete symphonies (pray that they finish the series!) includes the only one (No. 4) actually recorded by the composer himself–pretty dismally, as it turns out. What certainly isn’t dismal, though, is Dorian’s competing version with the Orquesta Sinfonica Simón Bolívar of Venezuela, a performance featuring almost identical tempos, richer string playing, but slightly less rhythmic acuity than this one. The couplings are different: Dorian offers a fine Second Cello Concerto and the tone poem Amazonas, while CPO gives us the CD premiere of Symphony No. 12. Only 23 minutes long and containing three bubbly movements plus a soulful adagio, this late work has an almost neo-classical pithiness, inasmuch as anything this composer wrote can be termed “pithy”. Villa-Lobos has received nothing like the recognition he deserves as a symphonist, largely because much of his music in this medium appears to avoid conventional forms–or any form at all, for that matter. But let’s face it, when you can write with this kind of fluency and spontaneity, who cares about form? Lie back, and let conductor Carl St. Clair and his marvelously recorded Stuttgart orchestra inundate your senses with this festive orgy of symphonic exuberance.
