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The music of the Venezuelan composer Federico Ruiz is totally
unknown outside his native country. This appears to be the first
time a whole CD devoted to his music has ever appeared. The
current catalogue only lists three short other items by him:
two piano pieces also played by this same pianist as part of
a recital of Latin-American piano music, and one song. These
are indeed the only examples available from what the booklet
note describes as a “vast output” including four concertos and
two operas, despite the fact that between 1976 and 1991 he has
been awarded a whole series of composition prizes in South American
competitions.
So one must begin any review by trying to convey what sort of
music this is. It is not all of the same style, with many of
the pieces here being very short indeed. At one time one thinks
of a sort of Latin-American Scott Joplin, with a tropical lilt;
at other times (not unexpectedly) of Villa-Lobos with a jazz
element added; at other times of a late species of impressionism.
This is not to say that Ruiz has no distinct personal style,
but that given the sheer number of short tracks - twenty-seven
in all, only five over three minutes in duration - it is extremely
hard to form a definite sense of it.
This is particularly true of the fourteen pieces that make up
the Piezos para ninos menores de cien anos which are
deliberately heterogeneous in manner and consist of a series
of vignettes illustrating different characters and situations.
Chaplin is the most perfect pastiche of a Joplin rag;
the Waltz for Dulcinea is Ravelian in its delicacy;
Dictator rides a moped returns us to the world of Joplin
but then subverts this with a hilarious passage in which the
piano falls over itself. On the other hand, Our Lady of
Sorrows is a concentrated meditation, and Encounter
between Antonio and Florentino, envisaging a meeting between
Venezuelan composer Antonio Estévez and a character from one
of his own operas, has a hieratic beauty that makes one wish
to know more about the composer in question. The Venezuelan
Waltzes are quietly rhapsodic pieces reminiscent of Lecuona
in one of his more somnolent moods, and there is not much variety
or contrast between the three pieces written at different times.
The Nocturne, the most recent piece on this disc and
also the longest, sounds much more serious; it was written for
and dedicated to the performer here. The idiom here is a bit
like early Messiaen without the birdsong, and shows a more modern
approach to piano timbre although it is not particularly nocturnal.
The hints of Venezuelan popular styles do not appear to be totally
absorbed into the whole; but this is probably the nearest we
come to a sense of what Ruiz is all about. The combination of
styles in the Triptico Tropical are even more disparate,
but one has the sense of a personal idiom which is not at all
unattractive. The final Allegro vivo movement again
evokes the spirit of ragtime and Joplin to enjoyable effect
before a conclusion which leads one to conclude that the spirit
of Les Six is not dead – Milhaud’s Scaramouche
is very close to the surface here.
Into this world the much earlier Micro-Suite intrudes
like a spectre at the wedding. It consists of a series of extremely
short pieces – only one of them over a minute in length – constructed
on Webernian twelve-tone lines. The third movement describes
itself as a passacaglia, although it hardly has enough time
to get any sort of a theme going; and the half-minute ‘scherzo’
is a joke only in its inconsequential brevity. The purpose of
including these pieces on this CD, clearly hardly representative
of the composer’s current style and not long enough in themselves
to establish any other sort of point, is not totally clear.
The booklet
and back of the CD insert both contain this most weird photograph
of the composer and pianist apparently meeting in something
like an industrial chemical treatment works which screams out
for an entry in a ‘caption competition’ – something on the lines
of “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
Anyway, wherever she is Rodríguez clearly enjoys playing this
music, and her enthusiasm is infectious. She has a good feel
for the exuberant idioms, and swings the ragtime passages as
to the manner born. And the recorded sound is excellent, in
just the right sort of acoustic.
It is not clear when this recording was made, although none
of the works on the CD date from later than 1994; however the
booklet notes make reference to events up to and including 2010,
and one would be interested to hear something from Ruiz which
would demonstrate how his style has evolved in the last fifteen
years and more. In the meantime we should be grateful to Rodríguez
for what we are given here, and for delivering it to us so well.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Clara Rodríguez (piano)