The Impossible Orchestra to Release First Album

Cover design for the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

This coming Friday, Outhere Music will release the inaugural album in collection entitled Fuga Latina. As is often the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. The full title of the album is Horizons: Live at Festival PAAX GNP. Information about that festival on the Amazon Web page is minimal, saying little more than the fact that the event took place on “Mexico’s Mayan Riviera.”

The album presents three compositions, all works of composers whose careers began in the second half of the last century: Paquito D’Rivera, Omar Massa, Yamandu Costa, and Sérgio Assad. The last of the three pieces was a joint effort by Costa and Assad. Alondra de la Parra conducts an ensemble called The Impossible Orchestra, described on its Facebook Web page as “30 outstanding artists from 14 different countries brought together by Alondra de la Parra to support women and children in Mexico.”

The full title of D’Rivera’s composition is “The Journey: Concerto for Violoncello, Clarinet, Erhu and Orchestra, ‘The Rice and Beans Concerto.’” For those unfamiliar with that last instrument, the Wikipedia page for erhu describes it as “a Chinese two-stringed bowed musical instrument, more specifically a spike fiddle, that is sometimes known in the Western world as the Chinese violin or a Chinese two-stringed fiddle.” The concerto is in three movements, entitled, appropriately enough, “Beans,” “Rice,” and “The Journey.” The erhu makes its first appearance at the beginning of the second movement.

Massa’s work also carries a similarly extended title: “Concerto for Bandoneon and Orchestra, ‘Buenos Aires-Berlin.’” This also has three movements: “Prologue & Tango,” “Prayer. Adagio,” and “Tango Scherzo. Finale.” Finally, the Costa-Assad “Ilhas Concertantes” has three movements with descriptive titles that I have yet to decode: “Itaparica,” “La Graciosa,” and “La Invernada.”

I have now listened to this album several times, and I am not quite sure what makes the ensemble “impossible.” Perhaps it has something to do with bringing together instruments distantly located in different regions of the globe. That definitely makes for diverse sonorities, but most of the tracks display an upbeat rhetoric that never really dwells on nationality. By the same count, there is nothing “impossible” in de la Parra’s leadership of the ensemble. If anything, the music is engaging for the attentive listener from the beginning of this album to the final track!