String Quartet No. 15 (Villa-Lobos)
String Quartet No. 15 is one of a series of seventeen works in the medium by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and was written in 1954. A performance lasts approximately nineteen minutes. History. Villa-Lobos composed his Fifteenth Quartet in 1954, working on it at the Tamanaco Hotel in Caracas, Venezuela and completing the score in New York. It was first performed by the Juilliard String Quartet (Robert Mann and Isidore Cohen, violins; Raphael Hillyer, viola; Claus Adam, cello) on 19 April 1958 in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, Washington , D.C., as part of the Inter-American Festival of Music. The score is dedicated to the New Music String Quartet "após a leitura excepcional desse quarteto na residência dos Embaixadores A. Berle em New York". Analysis. Like most of Villa-Lobos's works in this medium, the quartet consists of the traditional four movements: The final, Allegro movement opens with a fugato section, with the voices entering at the unusual intervals of a seventh, a third, and a fourth above the first statement in the cello. Discography. Chronological, in order of recording dates. String Quartet No. 15 (Villa-Lobos) String