Music: Choros in Manhattan

Best-known South American composer is Heitor Villa-Lobos, talkative, self-taught Brazilian, a man of tremendous energy who has written more than 1,400 pieces, and has said, "Better bad of mine than good of others." Last week, in connection with a big show of paintings by Brazil's Candido Portinari (TIME, Aug. 12), Manhattan's enterprising Museum of Modern Art did up Brazil's music in a package of six concerts. The Museum's elegant audiences and radio listeners gathered that African thumps and easygoing Portuguese tunes were Brazil's chief heritage. Wherever its music was going, Villa-Lobos was in the driver's seat: most of the pieces, including...