Villa-Lobos & Stravinsky: Pájaros Mágicos
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Available for pre-order now!
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Available on all streaming services March 20, 2026.
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Recorded live at Walt Disney Concert Hall in October 2023.
This new album from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel brings together two early-20th-century ballets inspired by mythical birds: Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird and Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Uirapuru. Written within a decade of each other, both works use folklore and avian myth to explore enchantment, transformation, and the thin margin between the natural and the supernatural.
Igor Stravinsky wrote The Firebird in 1910 for Sergei Diaghilev and his company, Ballets Russes, completing the score in just six months. The 1919 suite performed here distills the ballet’s dramatic arc from its shadowy opening, through the explosive Infernal Dance, to a radiant, triumphant finale often considered one of the most exultant endings in all of orchestral music. The work has remained a cornerstone of orchestral repertoire, especially in Los Angeles, where Stravinsky himself conducted it at the Hollywood Bowl in 1940.
Seven years after Stravinsky forged his fabled fire creature, Villa-Lobos began writing Uirapuru in Brazil, drawing on legends surrounding a small Amazonian bird believed to possess magical powers. The composition evolved over many years before reaching its final form in 1935. The music reflects Villa-Lobos’s experiences in the Amazon, punctuated with prominent bird calls, distinctive percussion, and Brazilian melody. The ballet’s story moves between violence and transformation before reaching its subdued conclusion, representing the restoration of balance in nature.
Conductor Gustavo Dudamel says, “The magical birds of The Firebird and Uirapuru have lived with me for many years. In Stravinsky’s 1919 suite, you feel an extraordinary balance between the raw energy that changed the course of music history and moments of incredible delicacy and beauty. Villa-Lobos’ music is born from the land, from the sounds of the forest, from myth, from the spirit of Brazil. In Uirapuru, the orchestra becomes nature itself: a living ecosystem of sound and texture. When you bring these two works together, something very powerful happens. Both works speak to myth, ritual, and transformation. I love this pairing because it creates a conversation between cultures, between the natural world and folklore, and between ancient stories and a musical language that continues to feel vibrant today.”
Written by near-contemporaries, the scores of Igor Stravinsky and Heitor Villa-Lobos offer two distinct visions of musical enchantment; one glows with orchestral brilliance and mythic spectacle while the other roots itself in the living world, drawing from the sounds and folklore of the forest. More than a century later, both works continue to reveal new truths about transformation, nature, and the unseen forces that shape human storytelling.
Featured Artists:
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Gustavo Dudamel, Music & Artistic Director
Pájaros Mágicos is currently available for pre-order, and will be available for streaming and download at these destinations on March 20, 2026:
Track Listing
1. VILLA-LOBOS Uirapuru
STRAVINSKY The Firebird Suite (1919 version)
2. I. Introduction
3. II. Dance of the Firebird
4. III. Dance of the Princesses
5. IV. Infernal Dance of King Kastchei
6. V. Berceuse
7. VI. Finale
About the Composers:
Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) was part of a generation of Latin-American composers who delved deeply into their country’s histories and folklores to find a specifically national musical voice. (Carlos Chávez, Alberto Ginastera, and, to a lesser extent, Silvestre Revueltas were also part of this cohort.) As a child, Villa-Lobos learned to play the cello and the clarinet from his father, an amateur musician who died when Heitor was eleven. Uninterested in pursuing a formal musical education, Villa-Lobos instead taught himself guitar and started playing in a street band in Rio de Janeiro. At 16, he joined a theatre orchestra as a cellist and also played in a cinema orchestra, immersing himself in popular music and music theatre for two years.
At 18, Villa-Lobos set out for Brazil’s interior. He spent the next decade traveling extensively, exploring the Amazon and encountering the rich folk music traditions of his country. The five years that followed were a period of intense creativity and also witnessed the affirmation of Villa-Lobos’ reputation as Brazilian classical music’s leading new voice. Concerts of his music were met with scathing reviews from reactionary, old-guard critics, which only increased interest in his music.
In 1923, after participating the year before as music’s representative in Brazil’s “Week of Modern Art,” Villa-Lobos went to Paris with the help of several influential friends and a government stipend. There, he met Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Varèse and achieved a level of acclaim won by no other Latin-American composer in Europe before or since. When he returned for good to Brazil in 1930, he was Brazilian music’s leading figure and a celebrity in international music circles.
The biography of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) reads like the history of Western music from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th. He moved away from the late-romantic vocabulary of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov in his early works, revolutionized music with The Rite of Spring, pioneered neo-classicism in the subsequent decades, and joined the serialists towards the end of his life. Throughout, Stravinsky was at the forefront of the musical avant-garde – first in Russia, then in Paris, and finally in Los Angeles – where he settled in 1940, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic numerous times.
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