It's better to simply accept the wily restlessness of Heitor Villa-Lobos' imagination than to box his styles into chronological periods. The composer's first of 17 string quartets is a breathtakingly transparent study in folkloric naïveté, cut down into six brief miniatures. But the second, written in the same year of 1915, is an ardent, expansive essay in lyrical proliferation, European in both its nostalgic and progressive moments. The surprising shift provides a Villa-Lobosian parable: this creativity travels and synthesizes, it is colonial and mercurial, and it lives like a butterfly, evading being pinned down. Villa-Lobos' Quartet No. 5, subtitled "Popular," is indeed one of his most popular essays in the genre. But its subtitle specifically refers to its material and demeanor: it is another project in synthetic folk music; in fact, along with the following Quartet No. 6, the Fifth is one of Villa-Lobos' most self-consciously "nationalist" works. Its massive reservoir of allusions, enthusiastic forgeries, and quasi-quotes betrays the composer's unbridled fascination with the ethnic music maze of Brazil, especially the (generally suppressed) African cultures there. But while the Quartet No. 5 makes a powerful commitment to the popular musics of the composer's country, it practices the opposite of commitment in relation to its own internal integrity. It is one of Villa-Lobos' most brazenly disjunct works, its method one of unified dis-unity. In a way, this really works and its success is impressive: the music must succeed entirely on the merits of timing and the luminescence of its ideas, and this it does. The opening Poco andantino is the densest of the quartet's four movements; it squeezes no less than ten "episodes" into about six minutes, each largely consisting of clear melodies and repeating accompaniment patterns. But the themes are so boldly attractive, so magnetically entertaining, and the montage moments are so well pulled off that the listener won't mind the incoherence that arises between the seams. The following Vivo ed energico, a kind of nativist scherzo, is less schizoid, but it makes up for its unity in the bursting swagger of its individual details. The third movement Andantino comes in place of a slow movement, instead offering the quartet's most bouncy, simply sunny movement, complete with a wry coda. The final Allegro breaks the illusion of naïveté with its performance demands: strung together with a simple moto perpetuo beginning in the cello, the movement's form is carefree and agile, but its performers must break their backs to have this much fun.

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