Mexican Concert Music Recorded by Naxos

courtesy of Naxos of America

Tomorrow Naxos will release a new album whose full title is El Árbol de la Vida: Music from Mexico. The contents consists of orchestral works by Mexican composers written in this and the preceding centuries. Indeed, the Spanish portion of the album title, which means “the tree of life,” was completed in 2015 by Hebert Vázquez and is being given its world premiere recording. This is also the case for the 2007 composition by Simone Iannarelli, “El último café juntos” (the last coffee together). The twentieth-century composers on the album are (in the chronological order of their respective works) Ricardo Castro, Silvestre Revueltas, and José Pablo Moncayo. For those who cannot wait, the Amazon.com Web page for this album is currently processing pre-orders.

The performing ensemble is the Orquestra Juvenil Universitaria Eduardo Mata, named after the conductor that, prior to his early death in a plane crash in 1995, was a leading advocate for contemporary music with particular attention to the works of his composition teacher Carlos Chávez. The album conductor is Gustavo Rivero Weber. Both of the 21st-century compositions feature solo guitar work, and the guitarist is Pablo Garibay.

For many (most?) readers, the familiar names are likely to be those of Revueltas and Moncayo. Here in San Francisco the Moncayo selection, “Huapango,” has been played frequently (if not consistently) at the annual Day of the Dead concerts given by the San Francisco Symphony. Unless I am mistaken, the piece was also my first encounter with the second Mexican composer to come to my attention when Norman Walker decided to create choreography for it. (The first composer was Revueltas; and that first encounter came from a radio broadcast of Leonard Bernstein conducting a New York Philharmonic performance of his “Sensemayá.” Columbia would later release a recording of that performance.)

It is easy to see why “Huapango” is a Day of the Dead favorite. The music is unabashedly joyous; and listening to it is definitely a fun experience, very much in the way that listening to Aaron Copland’s music for the ballet “Rodeo” is fun. Since, prior to encountering this album, “Sensemayá” was the only Revueltas composition that I know, I welcomed the opportunity to listen to something else. The selection is the four-movement suite that José Ives Limantour arranged from the score that Revueltas prepared for the film The Night of the Mayas. This music shares a rhetoric of grandeur that gradually unfolds in “Sensemayá.” It also reveals what appears to be one of Revueltas’ “signature” devices, the bold assertion of a dissonant pitch by a solo brass instrument, darkening the coloration of what might otherwise be joyful rhetoric.

The Vázquez composition provides the longest single track on the album. Like Revueltas, Vázquez has a keen ear for instrumentation; but he deploys it in an entirely different manner. The solo part is written for amplified (rather than electric) guitar; and the engineering behind the recording definitely finds the right way to balance the folk-style finger-work against the textures woven by the instrumental ensemble. In many ways this is the most impressive instance of “concert music” on the album; and, by all rights, it deserves a place in future SFS Day of the Dead programming.

The Iannarelli selection, on the other hand, is an arrangement for guitar and string orchestra of the fifth of the twelve pieces for solo guitar collected until the title Italian Coffee. As the title suggests, the piece is affectionate, perhaps to the point of being more than a little sappy. To give it the benefit of the doubt, it closes out the album with a brief gesture of quietude, following the intense energy of the Revueltas suite. Iannarelli’s piece also pairs nicely with the almost quaint retrospection of the earliest piece on the album, Castro’s Opus 23, a brief minuet for orchestra.