It has taken a very long time for The Discovery of Brazil, one of Villa-Lobos's most significant works, to reach the record catalogue. The original score—which incorporated orchestrations of three earlier pieces—was intended for a 1937 nationalist film, which however used only a fraction of it: the composer then expanded his version into the present four suites (totalling ten items), of which he conducted the first performance in Paris in 1952. (Lisa Peppercorn's book on Villa-Lobos seems to be 20 years adrift on this point.)
Predictably picturesque and colourful in nature, the work depicts the journey of the caravels, with the varied feelings of the aristocrats and seamen on board, the arrival in the strange new continent, and the celebration, amid friendly Indian spectators, of the first Mass in Brazil on May 1st, 1500. For this, Villa-Lobos had recourse to a very large orchestra and a great diversity of styles—Indian chants, popular Portuguese dances and saudades, Andalusian rhythms and Moorish melodic contours (since Spaniards and Moors may have been among the crew), plainchant, the Ave verum and Tantum ergo. Though something of a gallimaufry of moods and idioms (unified slightly by the recurrence in different guises of the passionate initial theme), taken as a whole it achieves a certain epic quality, as the composer intended: what it lacks in homogeneity is counterbalanced by the sheer exuberance of invention.
The Fourth Suite, in which the orchestra is joined by the chorus, is the most substantial, and the finale the most musically impressive, with some remarkable counterpoint; but the elaborate intertwining of Indian elements and the liturgical would have been more effective with more secure intonation from the chorus, especially the sopranos. Except for occasional anxieties in the very highest register of the violins, the orchestra rises splendidly to the whole score.'