It is a cliche to liken Villa-Lobos's denselytextured, exotically coloured scores to the lush masses of giant foliage and exuberant tropical life of the Amazonian jungle, but the simile is inescapable. His works, early and late, are permeated with his highly original and uninhibited idiom, in which he enthusiastically tapped primitive Indian sources (possibly inherited from his mother) to convey his pantheistic images of Nature. Amazonas, written in 1917 but not published or performed until 12 years later, is programmatically based on a story by the composer's father about an Indian virgin, bathing in the river, who is pursued by a monster. Scored for large orchestra with his usual reckless abandon (for example dividing the basses into six parts) and employing a solo viola d'amore and a phono-fiddle—Norman Del Mar makes one of his few errors in his invaluable book Anatomy of the orchestra by taking the latter for a zither—it vividly depicts the rustling of the forest by an extraordinary combination of string arpeggios in harmonics and on the wrong side of the bridge, while strange birdcalls and mysterious sounds erupt on all sides.
Erosao, composed for the Louisville Orchestra in 1950, is full of mystery, atmospherically illustrating (initially with some delicacy) the native legend of the sun and moon giving birth to the cataclysm which formed the Andes and the valley of the Amazon. Dawn in a tropical forest, also for Louisville, followed three years later, and again drew on Amerindian scales and motifs: the evocative opening leads to one of Villa-Lobos's most poetic, and also most disciplined, scores. At the other extreme of complexity is the 1954 ballet Genesis, a luxuriant wonderland of orchestral writing—Messiaen has called him ''the greatest orchestrator of the 20th century''—that, infinitely more imaginatively and wildly than Milhaud in his Creation du monde, depicts the rise of life on earth, from elemental creatures to the dominance of man. Virtually unknown though it is, this score must be recognized as masterly. Roberto Duarte, of the Teatro Municipal in Rio, succeeds in extracting accomplished, well-balanced virtuoso playing throughout from the Bratislava radio orchestra: together with excellent recording and an exceptionally good sleeve-note, this is a distinct feather in the cap for Marco Polo.'