Poema singelo

Unlike Piazzolla and Lecuona, who have only recently made their way into European concert halls, Villa-Lobos and Ginastera are two Latin-American composers have long been there - though not so much in piano recitals as in orchestral concerts, where Villa-Lobos is represented mainly by his Bachianas Brasileiras and Ginastera by his Estancia ballet music. Although he was not himself a pianist, during the course of his long career Villa-Lobos developed a formidable technique in writing for the instrument, not least through the encouragement of the pianist Lucíla Guimarães whom he met in 1912 and later married. Poema singelo (Simple Poem) seems at first to be a fairly candid and not too demanding emulation of Chopin in three-four time. But the two episodes which appear between the three appearances of the opening waltz material are both of them, particularly the second, virtuoso workouts in his own Brazilian manner. One of Villa-Lobos’s last piano pieces, Poema singelo is actually a more straight-forward tribute to Chopin than the Hommage à Chopin he was to write for the hundredth anniversary of the Polish composer’s a few years later.