Composer: VILLA-LOBOS; MARIO FICARELLI (b. 1935); GILBERTO MENDES (b. 1922); CARMARGO GUARNIERI (1907-1993); ALMEIDA PRADO (b. 1943); WILHELM ZOBL; JORGE PEIXINHO (1940-1995); AURELIO de la VEGA (b. 1925)

Information:
José Eduardo Martins performs Villa-Lobos masterpieces together with works written in homage to the Brazilian master on this first volume of Labor Records intriguing Music of Tribute Series.
The great Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was perhaps the most colorful and prolific of twentieth-century musical creators. Now Labor Records and the Brazilian pianist José Eduardo Martins have released a Music of Tribute album dedicated to him and consisting of some of his own major works for piano and tributes to him by younger composers.
Villa-Lobos himself is represented by two of his Cirandas ("Round Dances"), a set of pieces which recreate, with authentic melodic and rhythmic content, themes taken from Brazilian nursery rhymes. Chôro No 5, subtitled Alma Brasileira or "Brazilian Soul," is one of the composer's best-known scores for piano and combines elements from the three traditions that formed modern Brazil: Indian, European and Afro-Brazilian. The four character pieces that make up the colorful and virtuosic Ciclo Brasileiro or "Brailizian Cycle" are Plantio do Caboclo, Impressões Seresteira, Festa no Sertão and Dança do India Branca; these titles are difficult to translate but their sense might be rendered as Pioneer or Settler's Song, Strolling Minstrels, Hoedown in the Sagebrush and Dance of the White Indian.
A number of years ago, Martins invited a number of composers to write works in homage to Villa-Lobos. Several fellow Brazilians – including Almeida Prado, Gilberto Mendes and Mario Ficarelli – were joined by the Cuban-American, Aurelio de La Vega, the Portuguese Jorge Peixinho, Wilhelm Zobl from Austria and others. Martins presented the premiere of these pieces, an earlier tribute by Villa-Lobos' younger contemporary, Camargo Guarnieri, and some of Villa-Lobos' own music as part of the celebrations in commemoration of the centennial of the composer's birth in 1987. This concert has now become the basis of this Labor Records release. Like Villa-Lobos' own works, these tributes cover a wide range of styles from minimalist to serial and post-serial. In effect, these tributes pick up where the master himself left off and this interaction of new and old – part confrontation, part reinterpretation – sets off the familiar sounds of these older, almost classical works, giving them an entirely fresh context. The old and the new are juxtaposed so that they illuminate each other and this is the fundamental idea behind the Labor series of Tribute albums.