Tucked between the more expansive, lyrical profusions and cutting wit of the Second and Fourth string quartets, Heitor Villa-Lobos' Quartet No. 3 is generally overlooked. Its very moderation may be its fault—much of it employs a kind of deliberately equanimous pentatonic harmony—and Villa-Lobos manages to develop his material even less than in other quartets, which often bear the mark of a proudly tangential imagination. That said, the work does, in addition to its faithfully agreeable tone, demonstrate the protean side of Villa-Lobos; the rift the Third creates between its predecessor and follower reminds the listener not to think too developmentally about the composer's work. Music simply seemed to pour from him, in one style or another; its lack of effective or technical consistency is, among other things, its own method. Written in 1916 and revised three years later, the Quartet No. 3 became known after its Rio di Janiero premiere as the "Quarteto de pipocas," clearly in reference to the pizzicati used in the third movement Scherzo. The beginning of the score does introduce a crucial tendency in Villa-Lobos' subsequent quartets: it begins modally, with a pentatonic cell supported in part by double-stopped parallel fifths in the cello: an considersable technical challenge which must have fascinated the composer. This thick, rich sound was to become a hallmark of Villa-Lobosian quartets, declaring in its sensuality that raw bodily sound was at least as important as any compositional or psychological complexity—the more usual domain of the post-Beethoven quartet. The remainder of the first movement does develop its material from the opening pentatonic germ, occasionally leaning toward more facile means of invention: running ostinati, or a kind of automatized harmonic filling in, Renaissance fauxbourdon meets Impressionism's eleventh and thirteenth chords. The movement also shows, in its seams, the multifarious influences on Villa-Lobos, from Brazilian musical folklore to Russian contemporaries Prokofiev and Shostakovich, to Maurice Ravel's tropes on post-Impressionism. The Russian influence may have held over: the plucked and plucky Scherzo that follows (and which garnered the score its subtitle) was originally called "Scherzo satirico" and betrays Villa-Lobos' expressive bite and humor: sharp, but not nearly as fanged as the coded viciousness of Shostakovich. The third movement begins to develop a pattern seen in the slow movement of No. 2, whereby an undulating ostinato becomes the bed for a lovely melody, and the finale happily unfurls Villa-Lobos' Brazilian spontaneity.

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