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This performance by Deion Cho presents the unpublished original versions of the Études from Heitor Villa-Lobos' 1928 autograph manuscript, once owned by the Parisian publisher Max Eschig, the same house who published Villa-Lobos’s revised versions in 1953. There are many differences between the original manuscript and the later published version, and so it is clear that they are different versions of the set. In several of the études, the differences between the 1928 and 1953 versions are minimal; in others they are quite substantial, including added or omitted passages, or short sections that are composed quite independently. The importance of the earlier manuscript is also that it was prepared by the composer himself with meticulous care regarding details of fingering and dynamics ,in particular. In comparison, the printed edition includes less detail. Adding the detail from the earlier autograph onto the later edition is therefore very useful in the search for an interpretation that comes closer to the composer’s intentions. In these works, the eclecticism of Villa-Lobos’ style is revealed with unabashed honesty. For example, Étude 1 combines the composer’s love of the music of J.S. Bach with sounds that somehow can be identified with the less than civilised sounds of the Brazilian wilderness. It is an arpeggio study in E minor that contains distant echoes of the first prelude in J.S. Bach’s Well-tempered Klavier but with an internal passage in which Villa-Lobos writes a series of arpeggios based on a single chord with fixed left-hand fingering configuration, making it descend chromatically with the two upper strings as a pedal and creating a kaleidoscopic array of dissonance. With the guitar as his medium, Villa-Lobos brought together a series of seemingly incompatible musical elements that he managed to weld together with complete conviction and integrity. In 1940, twelve years after the Études and in the space of only a few months, Villa-Lobos composed his five Préludes in Rio de Janeiro in 1940, having finally returned from his sojourns in France. In a more refined style than the Études, they also show the eclectic nature of his musical language, and his ability to marry the musical flavours of Brazil with both the innate idiom of the guitar and with European traditions. Although not published with subtitles, Villa-Lobos referred to them as a series of homages in praise of contrasting aspects of Brazil and Brazilian society, except for Prélude 3 which he declared a homage to J.S. Bach in the spirit of his Bachianas Brasileiras series. To the composer, the other four preludes were homages to (1) the northern Brazilian sertão, (2) the beloved streetwise delinquents of Rio, (4) the Brazilian Indians, and (5) to the classy young men and women who frequented the concert halls and theatres of Rio. Superimposed on these descriptions is the rhapsodic melody of Prélude 1, associable with both European Romanticism and the popular modinha; the sounds of the virgin Amazon forests in the central sections of Préludes 2 and 4, and the elegant melodies of popular urban salon music that dominate Prélude 5. - John Griffiths