"...l'enfance rejointe par the technicien..."—Jean Cocteau

Cocteau's famous phrase—possibly translated as "childhood re-encountered through the technician"—offers an ideal spotlight on Heitor Villa-Lobos' late works. The milieu of Cocteau might at first seem distant from this Brazilian musical giant in old age; it seems to refer more to fleet perfection and guileless gilded juvenilia of 1920s French music, like Ravel's Ma mère l'oye, than to a South American writing in the 1950s. But in works like Villa-Lobos' Sixteenth and penultimate string quartet, a kind of kindred spirit shines through. The absolute comfort, the technical perfection and confidence, the fusion of opulence and economy, and the beautifully rendered naïveté all call out to Ravel and to Debussy, and in general to an earlier twentieth century French aesthetic that Villa-Lobos was indeed a participant during his own youth. Hence the Sixteenth is a characteristic "late work," simultaneously returning to and transfiguring youthful experiences, younger days, and earlier aesthetics with a sheer ability not present "back then."

The first movement is one of the most technically perfect in all Villa-Lobos' quartets. Its opening motive of an augmented second is passed around to all four voices and initiates a movement unified by this cell; Villa-Lobos scholars Arnaldo Estrella and Eero Tarasti praise the unforced, spontaneous nature of the movement's tonal development and voice-leading in particular. With its ardent affections, the slow movement is a surprise in the context of Villa-Lobos' usual, more reflective andantes; after a high-flying violin theme, the cello unfolds a truly expansive, accompanied monologue of considerable intensity. Tarasti finds much Tchaikovsky in the third-movement scherzo; the Russian, with his own love of childhood scenes, mechanical precision, and jewel-limned pageantry, seems yet another ideal foil for Villa-Lobos' remarkable graciousness in dealing with influences. His scherzo archetypes, themselves reinterpretations of Mozart through Mendelssohn, are further infused here with Villa-Lobos' prized Brazilian hemiolas and metric complications. Perhaps as a nod to Beethoven's late quartets, Villa-Lobos includes a striking transition between the scherzo and the finale. In reality, it is not really even a transition: it shifts meters and gestures every two or three of its 32 bars, and seems a definite show of sympathy for Beethoven's own anti-transitions. Both are moments when the composer steps out of his own sound-play to talk to the audience as master artificer, and then he steps back in for a finale of further reveries and wonders.

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