Although not typical of the composer's mature style and voice, this early work is beautiful, charming music, expressed surely and directly to the audience. The style of the music is quite similar to the late-Romantic string serenades and suites by such composers as Elgar, Suk, Dvorák, and Tchaikovsky, with a touch of salon music thrown in.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) became Brazil's leading composer and South America's best-known composer. His emergence on the international scene began after his meeting with Darius Milhaud in 1916, when Milhaud was a secretary to the French Ambassador in Rio. Milhaud quickly acquainted the fast-learning Villa-Lobos with new styles and found them congenial to his wish to express Brazilian elements in his music, and a decade of residence in Paris in the 1920s cemented his fame.

The crucial five-year period during which he consolidated his technique and personal melodic style and met Milhaud (say, 1912-1917) found Villa-Lobos at his most prolific, which is saying a lot for a composer who wrote well over 500 cataloged works. One can almost hear his self-assurance growing during the course of this three-movement, 18-minute work, which received its premiere in 1915 with the Orchestra of the Sociedade de Concertos Sinfônicos in Rio, with Francisco Braga conducting. There is an unconfirmed contention that Villa-Lobos originally wrote the music in this suite on commission for some theatrical performance and then transformed it into the suite.

The work has born three different titles, all given in the headnote above. The "Suite caracteristica" appears to be the composer's original title. When publisher Max Eschig issued it in print, the company assigned the simple title Suite for strings. In 1989, it appeared in the third edition of the catalog of Villa-Lobos' works as Suite for double string quartet.

It is scored for a standard string orchestra, but there are frequent sections where one of the five sections of the orchestra is divided, making it playable by the ten players of a double string quintet, although that option would be somewhat bass-heavy. It is more often played by a larger string orchestra.

It is in three movements, each given an adjectival description in French (using feminine gender for each adjective): Timid ("Timide"), Mysterious ("Mystérieuse"), and Restless ("Inquiète"), The last movement is subtitled "Air de ballet."

Both of the first two movements are slow. The first is lyrical and quite limited in mood, as if the orchestra is portraying the shy character of its heroine. The second is the most "modern" movement of the suite. Aside from being the most adventurous in terms of harmony, using complex major/minor chords and chromatic progressions and much exercise of the arch-romantic chord of the diminished seventh, it uses special effects such as muted strings.

The finale is a simpler matter, a lyrical, flowing dance movement of beguiling gracefulness.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide