The Naxos cycle of Villa-Lobos symphonies is becoming a protracted affair. This is the fifth instalment of a series that Isaac Karabtchevsky and the São Paulo Symphony began five years ago. The First and Second symphonies are still to be recorded; the Fifth has been lost. The Eighth, Ninth and 11th were all composed in the 1950s, the decade that ended with Villa-Lobos’s death, and all were introduced by orchestras in the US – the Philadelphia gave the premieres of the Ninth in 1952 and the delayed first performance of the Eighth three years later, and the Boston Symphony commissioned the 11th, also in 1955.
Unlike the ambitious, choral 10th Symphony, which is the odd work out in this late sequence, Symphonies 8, 9 and 11 are all compact, well-behaved pieces, fundamentally neoclassical. There’s none of the wild unruliness that makes the best of Villa-Lobos’s music so attractive. But though there are hints of Stravinsky and even Roussel in some of the writing, there’s never anything derivative about it. Villa-Lobos always remain himself, whatever style he adopts or musical material he makes use of.
