Title: String Quartet No. 6
Description: "I love to write quartets. One could say that this is a mania." - Heitor Villa-Lobos to Pierre Vidal in Paris, spring 1958. Villa-Lobos' mania was not just "writing quartets." In truth, it was writing any kind of music, as is testified to by the composer's unfathomably large output. But if anything comes up against composing as a kind of complementary mania, it's surely Villa-Lobos' love of traveling and specifically, his sojourning affair with Brazil itself, an often under-acknowledged melting pot of cultures colonial and colonized, native and nativized. There is a story of Villa-Lobos traveling for so long when he was a youth that his mother thought him devoured by cannibals and had a mass said in his name; a happy shock it was when he returned to write some more music -- maniacally, of course. Few works in any genre illustrate these twin manias like Villa-Lobos' String Quartet No. 6. Written in 1938 but premiered only five years later in Rio di Janiero by the Quartetto Haydn, the work is intended as a kind of companion piece to 1931's "Quarteto Popular." The Sixth has its own subtitle, "Brasiliero," but essentially works on the same aesthetic, whereby a rich plethora of Brazilian folk musics are plumbed, quoted, stylized, and eventually threaded together into a delightful if motley edifice. But while the Quartet No. 5 offers one of Villa-Lobos' most brazenly free-wheeling forms, the Sixth is a kind of deliberate revision in the direction of musical economy and integration. As such, it shows a definite growth in the seven-year gap: the entire first movement, for instance, organically grows from the single, unremarkable opening cell. And this very method allows Villa-Lobos to uninhibitedly travel into a wide palette of styles and effects. The bright E major of the beginning soon adopts the syncopations found in the north Brazilian sertao. The very same cell becomes a bass line in the subsequent Allegretto and the following Andante takes its theme from the Allegretto. Villa-Lobos called this movement "slightly tragic" and it is indeed the darkest spot of this otherwise gleeful work. The final Allegro vivace is technically in the minor, but any darkness is swept aside by an impish polyrhythmic stride. Not once but twice do tangential episodes reroute the plot: first in an evocation of a folk harmonica that brilliantly creates a kind of pulmonary organ out of the four players, breathing in and out; and second, a kind of melancholic window that recaptures some of the Andante's furtive pathos. - Seth Brodsky at allmusic.com