Villa-Lobos is one of those composers who is saddled by just the wrong amount of fame: what I mean is that thanks to the inimitable strains of his Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5, and that once-heard never-forgotten soprano soaring wordlessly, sumptuously, unforgettably above all those cellos, it's easy to think of him as a one-hit wonder. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, as the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Total Immersion in Brazil's most famous composer on 8 March hopes to show.



Mind you, they've set themselves an impossible task. Even more than every other composer whose music you can't completely represent in a single day of concerts, talks, and films, Villa-Lobos's output is so gigantic that anything apart from about a month of total immersion couldn't get you close to his real achievement as a musician.

The common criticism is that Villa-Lobos simply wrote too much music, that he lacked a critical filter that allowed him to hone his craft, and instead gave full rein to his natural musical effulgence. There's some truth in that - if you're honest about the quality of Villa-Lobos's music. As guitarist John Williams told Radio 3's Music Matters, the Guitar Concerto (written towards the end of his life, in 1951) just isn't a very good piece, technically or musically, with its underdeveloped ideas, its sense of being written in a hurry, and its lack of a real relationship between the soloist and the orchestra.

But such critical carping rather misses the point of a musician who, arguably more than any other composer of the 20th century, summed up an entire country in his music. Villa-Lobos said that his first harmony teacher was a map of Brazil, and his life in music is a reflection of the expansive, explosive cultural, geographical, and musical diversity of his home country.

Consider this: Villa-Lobos was attempting to use music from the native Brazilian populations he visited in the Amazon, from the street-corner chorus bands he played in as a teenager, from the European traditions that he knew as a cello player, and from the modernisms he discovered in Paris, and to put them all together in a musical language that would be truly synoptic and representative of the totality of the Brazilian experience in the early decades of the 20th century. After becoming the country's most famous and most avant-garde composer in the 1910s and 20s, Villa-Lobos was happy to be used in Getulio Vargas's regime as the figurehead of the country's national music education project, and to shape the country's musical identity in its anthems and shared melodies.

But it's the music that Villa-Lobos wrote for the concert hall, in the forms that he defined and made his own, especially his series of pieces called Choros (there are 14 numbered pieces in the series, ranging from a solo guitar piece to a double piano concerto, no 8, which the BBCSO will play on Saturday) and the Bachianas Brasileiras (nine of them, all for different combinations of instruments and voices) that really defines his output. In the best of these pieces, Villa-Lobos manages something that most of his European modernist colleagues couldn't. When Villa-Lobos uses melodies from the native populations of Brazil, or from the popular music he heard in Rio; when he turns his orchestra into a rainforest through some astonishing onomatopoeia, or uses some high-modernist dissonance, he's not doing so with irony, parody, or critical distance. And neither is he attempting to put them all together in a soup-like fusion: instead, he's allowing the different worlds of Brazil - its different peoples, its wildly divergent landscapes, its unknowable richness of forest, of animal and plant life - to coexist alongside and on top of one another, sometimes in harmony, but often in conflict and irresolution, too. If you want a 12-minute distillation of Villa-Lobos's project, you can't do better than his Choros no 10 (the climax of the BBCSO's concerts on Saturday); listen to it, and prepare for your jaw to hit the floor. The piece dramatises the relationship between the unspoilt wilderness of the Amazon and what happens when humans arrive. In Paris in 1927, a critic wrote that the piece is a "huge and alarming orchestral fresco … an art which we do not recognise but to which we must now give a new name". In a sense, we're still waiting; it's music that still does something that sounds contemporary.

But don't stop there: as well as all those Choros and Bachianas Brasileiras, enjoy a journey of Brazilian discovery through Villa-Lobos's string quartets, symphonies, operas, guitar pieces, songs, and... There's enough out there for a month of Total Immersions, so to get you started, here are five pieces that I think will take you places in music that only Villa-Lobos saw.

• Choros 10

• Rudapoêma

• Choros 11

• Uirapuru

• Bachianas Brasileiras no. 9

The BBC Symphony Orchestra's Villa-Lobos: Total Immersion day is at the Barbican on 8 March.

• This article was amended on 10 March 2014. An earlier version referred to Bachianas Brasileiras as Bachianas Brasilieras.