String Quartet No. 11

String Quartet No. 11, A. 481 (1947) I. Allegro non troppo II. Scherzo, vivace III. Adagio IV. Poco andantino (quasi allegro) Cuarteto Latinoamericano Written in 1947 but premiered only some six years later, Heitor Villa-Lobos' String Quartet No. 11 appears at first as a continuation of the composer's "one quartet a year" policy, which had previously accounted for the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth quartets. But the Eleventh is different: the previous triad of scores seemed to deliberately extend and condense the complexity and restless creativity of the massive Seventh (1942), culminating in the hyper-chromatic Ninth; the Eleventh quartet, however, overturns this tide to introduce Villa-Lobos' "late style." And like many composers' late styles, Villa-Lobos' is, to some degree, a return to earlier sounds, affections, and interests. Gone in the Eleventh are the angular polyphonic skeins and extremely slippery semitonal voice-leading that characterize the previous works. Instead, Villa-Lobos revisits the rich, hazy diatonicism of his more youthful ventures. Also prevalent, especially in the buoyant first movement, is an utterly unapologetic homophony, unfolding with delight in its own sonorousness. Often, Villa-Lobos strings together entire passages with gentle, waving ostinati surrounded by unadorned whole-note double-stops in the remaining instruments; these fields of motoric slowness are often buffered by playful scalar activity in which the players diverge directions. The cumulative effect is of a naïveté transfigured; Villa-Lobos could certainly write more sophisticated music, but he intentionally seems to be "playing simple" here. However, just as the delicacy of rendering limns that simplicity with a ring wiser than its content, thus does the quartet's pervasive lightness gain the gravity of a late work. Also characteristic of the work, and of Villa-Lobos' subsequent quartets, is a clearer invitation to influences; they appear less fragmented and repressed, roving more freely through the work. The third-movement Scherzo, for instance, pares its material into a deliberately anonymous pastoral array of themes; in doing so, it calls to mind two great transfigurers of naïveté -- Haydn and Dvorák -- both of whom wrote quartets, the former playing "faux rustic" and the later "faux American." Villa-Lobos similarly operates in the Scherzo's ensuing development, purposely reworking this pastoral stuff into polyrhythmic networks that reverse its nature. After the rhapsodic lyricism of the opening cello theme, the slow movement produces a violin melody that quotes an earlier piece of the composer's, the piano waltz Valsa da dor. The finale, in typical Villa-Lobosian style, is an essay in casual joy; carrying a decidedly neo-Classical air, it C majors into sonic sunlight. [allmusic.com] Art by Varvara Stepánova