World Premiere Recordings of López on MSR Classics

from the Amazon.com Web page for this album

Last month MSR Classics released a new album entitled Symphonic Canvas, showcasing two recent orchestral works by Jimmy López Bellido. Among opera lovers, López is probably best known as the composer of Bel Canto, whose libretto by Nilo Cruz drew upon the novel of the same name by Ann Patchett. It is worth observing that, back in 2010, the Cypress String Quartet performed a quartet by Elena Ruehr entitled “Bel Canto” and based on the same novel. I started to read the book prior to the San Francisco performance of this piece, and I have to confess that I did not get very far before bailing on it. This may have led to my negative approach to Ruehr’s musical evocation of the novel.

Both of the compositions on Symphonic Canvas are world premiere recordings. One of them is entitled, Bel Canto – A Symphonic Canvas. It is a three-movement suite based on thematic material from the opera. The other is López’ first symphony, given the title “The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda.” This composition also has a literary connection, the last novel by Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. Both pieces are performed by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Music Director Miguel Harth-Bedoya.

López tends to be at his best when he is evoking grand sounds. The four movements of the symphony correspond to the four books of Cervantes’ novel, but the composer makes it clear that he is not trying to reflect on the narrative flow of the novel. Thus, each movement has more to do with spirit than with narration; and the spirits are at their liveliest in the third movement.

When it comes to flesh, however, neither of these compositions reveals López in a particularly inventive light. He clearly has a strong command of a wide scope of rhetorical devices, but there is little to attract or sustain the attention of a serious listener. Over the course of my own listening experiences (yes, I try to deal with the content of new recordings more than once), the cliché that kept popping up in my mind was, “I’ve seen this movie before.” It then occurred to me that the symphony was a soundtrack for a movie that had not been made. I further speculated that López’ decision to compose the Bel Canto opera might have emerged from his reaction to Paul Weitz’ movie adaptation of Patchett’s novel, until I realized that the release of the film did not take place until after the world premiere of the opera!