The orchestral honours here are shared between three orchestras.
The main burden is taken between the Mexican State Philharmonic
and the Mexico City Symphony Orchestra. The Royal Philharmonic
take up the ‘slack’ with the Chavez
Antigona and
Romantica, the Violin Concerto by Halffter and the Chavez
Chapultepec, Ponce’s
Ferial and
Instantaneas,
the Revueltas
Toccata and the Ponce
Estampas.
All the recordings have been licensed out to Brilliant by the
Sanctuary Group having originally formed part of ASV’s distinguished
Mexican series.
Mexican orchestral music is represented here by three symphonies
by Chavez (three of his six), two violin concertos (Ponce and
Halffter), a piano concerto by Ponce and the Ponce Guitar Concerto.
In fact we get all three of Ponce's dazzlingly imaginative concertos.
Otherwise we hear nine pieces by Revueltas, ten by Chavez, eleven
by Ponce including those three concertos and his most famous piece
taken up by many violinists including Heifetz,
Estrellita.
Chavez's
Chapultepec overture is cheeky with a dash of
Sousa-style excess to add a kick. Ponce's
Ferial is from
1940 and is a lividly lit though subtle counterpart to
Rapsodie
espagnole. It was first conducted by Erich Kleiber. The
Instantaneas
are a series of short Mexican snapshots with the rasping rattle
and gourd noises we may be familiar with from Villa-Lobos's Indianist
and jungle pieces. These are interspersed with virile little village
dances - sombrero commercial and drowsy sentimental. Revueltas's
Toccata is jerky and fragmented, like a doll dance escaped
from
Pulcinella. Beside Ponce, Revueltas sounds like the
modernist. Ponce's
Estampas Nocturnas are substantial and
their language is thoughtful, impressionistic and watercolour-sentimental
- none of the lurid colours we associate with the Mexican sound.
This is more Mexico City aspiring to Vienna than to Indianist
and other ethnic origins.
After a disc of lighter if not always slight fare we next encounter
three major works. Ponce's 1942 Violin Concerto is taken by Henryk
Szeryng whose singing silver tone suits the work very well. This
is a delightful chucklingly serenading romantic work closer to
Barber, Walton and Glazunov than to anything grim. However something
more Bergian seeps into the bones for the central
andante espressivo.
The finale is catchy and chipper. It uses the popular song
Manitas.
Chavez's
India symphony is from the mid-1930s. It was premiered
in New York with the composer conducting. It's in a single movement
in one track incorporating four episodes. It is alive with virile
rhythmic interest and with the flavour of ethnic percussion: tenebari,
grijutian, teponaxtli and hupenhuehuetl, the latter two being
drums and the former rattles. Beyond these decorative details
the lyrical material reminded me of Copland. Revueltas's four
movement
La Noche de las Mayas is a half hour work in four
movements. It is extracted from a film score written for the 1939
film of the same name. Its cinema origins probably explain why
the music is often more commercial and even rather more like Ponce
than the tough originality we come to expect from Revueltas. That
modernity can be heard however in the terse, blaring and gritty
Noche de encantamiento with its braying horns and rattle-scrape
ostinati.
Madrid-born Rodolfo Halffter left Spain for Mexico in 1939. His
1942 Violin Concerto was written with Samuel Dushkin in mind;
the same Dushkin who commissioned and premiered the Stravinsky
Violin Concerto. It has some of the Stravinsky's brusque neo-classicism
with a splash of de Falla to mitigate the desiccation. It also
sports an affecting central
Andante cantabile. It is heard
in its 1953 edition made by the soloist here, Henryk Szeryng.
This set has justified claims to definitive status given the involvement
of Szeryng in both the Ponce and the Halffter.
Moncayo's
Huapango is something of a fixture in Latino
classical collections from Bernstein and Dudamel. It dates from
1941. It's a beaming bright and sharply rhythmic piece which is
brilliantly orchestrated. Here it is carried off with panache.
Revueltas's
Cuauhnahuac (1930) is his first major orchestral
work. It's a portrait in sound of the town of Cuernavaca but by
its Indian name. It is uproarious, howling and braying, whooping
in the manner of a Markevich score, with a sentimental core and
rampant closing pages.
The Ponce
Concierto del Sur is played by Alfonso Moreno.
It is one of the most instantly pleasing works on the disc and
I commend it to you if you like the Rodrigo
Aranjuez,
Andaluz
or
Madrigal. It has a gift of a tune at 2:02 which
returns from time to time. The sierra-cool
Andante is hardly
less fine. If you would like to sample then look no further than
the final movement. Slake your thirst for more Rodrigo with this
utterly captivating guitar concerto premiered by Segovia and Ponce
in Montevideo in 1943.
Revueltas's
Redes (Nets) I knew from the old RCA LP made
by Eduardo Mata in the 1970s. It is an excitingly dissonant piece
of explosive material. This is laced with haunted nostalgic divagations
which can be quite affecting.
Redes was written for a socialist-realist
film of the same name which depicted the impoverished life of
the fisherman. Three years before that score he wrote the
Homenaje
a Garcia Lorca in 1935. It's a raucous celebratory piece full
of sour dissonance and Stravinskian gestures. Also memorable is
the elegiac vinegar of a trumpet solo. Jimenez's
Tres
cartas de Mexico was a discovery for me with its Petrushkan
bustle and poetically accessible local colour. Four guitars (Cecilia
Lopez, Juan Reves, Jesus Ruiz, Alfredo Sanchez Oviedo) put in
an appearance in the final
Allegro. It's all very attractive.
Blas Galindo Dimas is better known as Blas Galindo. His
Homenaje
a Cervantes is neo-Baroque and undemandingly entertaining.
It's followed by the fluffy Gottschalk-like pearly glitter of
a turn of the century effusion for piano and orchestra by Herrera.
Lastly, Chavez's transcription of a Buxtehude
Zarabanda can
be seen in the same league as the massive orchestrations of Bach
organ pieces. This is however rather intensely romantic. These
works lead naturally to Halffter’s transcriptions of three
Soler sonatas. Their super-inflated orchestration and steroidal
Handelian glare allow for a rather finely turned
Allegretto
grazia.
Revuletas's
Sensemaya takes us back into the feral jungle
and wild antiquity of the Mayan past. This is more in the whooping
thudding direction of
The Rite of Spring. Galindo's enjoyable
Sones de Mariachi (1940) revels in Mexican postcard brightness.
Ponce's classic hit
Estrelita is a sentimental hit and
is better known from the Heifetz transcription. Here it is heard
in its heavily luxurious orchestral version - almost Korngold.
Halffter's 1952
Obertura Festiva is flightily neo-classical
but at times too heavily booted to take wing. More harmonically
sour and thorny is the
Tripartita of 1959. Revueltas's
Janitizio of 1933 depicts the revels of a seaside resort.
It’s honking, hip-swaying and uproarious. Although written
for an instrumental Octet his
Ocho por Radio (1933) is
in much the same squeaky, impudent and characterful vein. Vilanueva's
Vals Poetico apes the grand metropolitan waltzes of Europe
and does so smoothly and with some style. Chavez's 1937
Chaconne
is another wonderfully inflated and upholstered Buxtehude
transcription belonging in the same noble league as the classic
Stokowski-Bach arrangements.
CD 6 is a fascinating all-Ponce collection. The sound glares a
bit in the 1912 Ponce Piano Concerto but the work is in the gleamingly
romantic conservative tradition of Liszt, Chopin and Arensky.
Thunder and screes of pearly notes are thrown hither and yon by
the impassioned Jorge Federico Osorio - very enjoyable if not
appreciably Mexican. The affecting elegance of
Gavota is
in the aristocratic ballroom tradition.
Balada Mexicana includes
a piano solo part, here played by Seva Suk. It is once again in
the exotic Gottschalk idiom with a smoking Latino element. The
Dance of the Ancient Mexicans is skilled and shapely but
the composer seems to caricature rather than suggest anything
at all vivid or dangerous - fun though. Lastly the three movement
Chapultepec is an impressionistic picture premiered in
a concert it shared with Ravel's
Rapsodie espagnole. This
quarter-hour piece can be seen as an extension of
Ferial which
has a similarly Gallic impressionist signature. It is a fine discovery
and well worth devoting listening time.
Poema Elegiaco of
1935 breaks the deferential European mould with moody ambiguity
and even tacit threat. This is one of the most attractive disks
in the set. In fact Ponce emerges as hardly the most original
figure but a composer whose music is often rewarding.
The seventh disc is an all-Chavez affair. His 1947
Toccata
for Orchestra begins in an eerie Berlioz-like chill and finally
erupts in a volcanic blast. The notes tell us that this impressive
music is based on an incidental score for a ‘Don Quixote’
stage adaptation. The diptychal
Paisajes Mexicanas (1973)
is the most recent piece. It has a raw and glaring edge - something
more in common with the blare of the classic Revueltas scores.
The 1943 suite
La Hija de Colquide (the Medea legend) was
written for Martha Graham for performance at the Library of Congress.
The five movement suite is allocated a single track where in this
respect decisions for the rest of the set have been well handled.
It ranges from gentle woodwind musing to indianist rattle, rasp,
gong, whistle and mystery. We hear much the same smoking sense
of peril as in Barber's
Medea ballet - clearly a popular
theme. The indianist aspect is to the fore again in the brilliant
and rhythmically emphasised
Cantos de Mexico of 1933 which
ends in the dazzling white teeth, frills and uproar predictive
of Copland’s
El Salon Mexico. I wonder how these
Mexican composers viewed Copland's work. The short 1953
Baile
has that upstart, cheeky Mexican brightness and serenading
brilliance. Both
Cantos and the roaring
Baile would
pair well with the Copland work or make a nice change from it.
The last disc of the set pairs Chavez and Revueltas. The good
though typo-ridden notes by David Moncur remind us that there
are seven Chavez symphonies from the 1916
Sinfonia para orquesta
(not numbered) to the 1961 Sixth. There is a Vox set of all
the six numbered symphonies on VoxBox (
review
review).
The
Sinfonia de Antigona is his first numbered symphony.
It groans and rasps with Sophoclean tragedy. The material is drawn
from music he wrote for Cocteau's updated rewrite of the work.
Clearly scarifying Greek themes attracted him as his score for
the Medea-based Martha Graham ballet
Hija de Colchide shows.
This is stern music with moments of repose from threat serving
to emphasise what they separate yet also providing some spiritual
let-up. The symphony ends in calm.
The Fourth Symphony is the
Sinfonia Romantica in three
movements. It was written to a commission from the stupendously
active and affluent Louisville Orchestra. The
Sinfonia Romantica
is romantic certainly - not quite Howard Hanson but the first
movement recalls Korngold at times. The
molto lent middle
movement sings with a little more remorse and reserve. A bustling
dynamic enlivens the final
Vivo with skirling trumpet fanfares,
woodwind mariachi contributions and rowdy heroics. The first version
of the finale is in fact the
Baile heard earlier.
The rest of the last disc is given over to Revueltas. His
Caminos
is jaunty, agreeably unsophisticated, explosive, jaunty and
oompah-wild. Occasional passages sound as if Markevitch had worked
over the
Capriccio Italien.
Musica para charlar (Music
to converse to) is drawn from the score he wrote for his 1938
documentary film
Ferrocariles de Baja California (Baja
California Railroad). In this sense alone it parallels Virgil
Thomson's music for the films
Louisiana Story and
The
Plow that Broke the Plain. It's not as dissolute and fissile
as
Caminos and in fact from time to time amid the railway
rhythms it indulges in turn of the century Ballroom lavish. It's
a specially agreeable score and a little less challenging than
some of his classic works. It's good that Revueltas chose to rescue
it as a concert item.
Ventanas (Windows) of 1931 revels
in ambivalence. Its underlying thunder-cloud tension is sustained
throughout. Imperious writing unleashes chaotic forces which rupture
the mood. Revueltas happily sends murderous and rather haphazard
military bands into the street scene with their band parts mixed
up. This does not cause them to lose their overwheening confidence.
Instead they lay into the music which at the last erupts in a
furnace blast of sound.
The booklet is plagued with typos which is a pity but is not an
obstacle to understanding. The lengthy English-only notes are
by David Moncur.
I hope that Brilliant are not finished with the Sanctuary Group
negotiations. There are many intriguing opportunities for a Khachaturian
box, a set of British light music beyond the brace of five CD
boxes on Resonance, and so much more.
I trust that the Mexican government have bought stacks of these
sets and are giving them away in delegate packs for conferences
on the culture and attractions of a country in whose artistic
musical achievements it can take a fierce pride.
Rob Barnett
Track details
CD 1 [57:46]
Carlos CHÁVEZ (1899-1978) Chapultepec "Republican
Overture" (1935) [6:27]
Manuel PONCE (1882-1948)
Ferial (1940) [15:20]
Instantaneas Mexicanas (1938) [12:03]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940) Toccata [3:55]
Manuel PONCE (1882-1948) Estampas Nocturnas (1932)
[20:01]
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Enrique Bátiz
CD 2 [71:41]
Manuel PONCE (1882-1948)
Concerto for violin and orchestra (1943) [31:52]
Carlos CHÁVEZ (1899-1978)
Symphony No.2 "Sinfonia India" (1935-6) [12:11]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
La Noche de los Mayas (1939) [27:30]
Henryk Szeryng (violin)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Enrique Bátiz (concerto)
Orquesta Filarmónica de la ciudad de México/Enrique
Bátiz
CD 3 [63:58]
Rodolfo HALFFTER (b.1900)
Violin Concerto, op. 11 (rev. Szeryng) (1942 rev 1953) [20:25]
José Pablo MONCAYO (1912-1958)
Huapango (1941) [7:59]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
Cuauhnáhuac (1930)†[9:52]
Manuel PONCE (1882-1948)
Concierto del sur (Concerto of the South) (1941) § [25:09]
Henryk Szeryng (violin); §Alfonso Moreno (guitar)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
†Orquesta Filarmónica de la ciudad de México/Enrique
Bátiz
Orquesta Sinfónica del estado de Mèxico/Enrique
Bátiz
CD 4 [63:06]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
Redes - Suite (1938) [15:42]
Homenaje a Garcia Lorca (1935) [10:52]
Miguel Bernal JIMÈNEZ (1910-1956)
Tres cartas de Mexico- symphonic suite (1949) [10:27]
Blas GALINDO DIMAS (b.1910)
Homenaje a Cervantes- suite (1947) [9:58]
Ricardo Castro HERRERA (1864-1907)
Vals Capricho (1901) [9:21]
Carlos CHÁVEZ (1899-1978)
Zarabanda (1943) [6:03]
Cecilia López, Juan Reves, Jesus Ruiz (guitars) (Jimenez)
Alfredo Sánches Oviedo (guitar); Eva Suk (piano) (Herrera)
Orquesta Filarmónica de la ciudad de México/Enrique
Bátiz
CD 5 [68:56]
Antonio SOLER (1729-1783)
Tres sonatas (orch. Halffter, 1951) [11:08]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
Sensemayá (1938) [5:20]
Blas GALINDO DIMAS (b.1910)
Sones de Mariachi (1940) [7:03]
Manuel PONCE (1882-1948)
Estrellita [4:27]
Rodolfo HALFFTER (b.1900)
Obertura Festival, Op. 21 (1952) [6:20]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
Janitzio (1933) [6:01]
Rodolfo HALFFTER (b.1900)
Tripartita, Op.25 (1959) [12:20]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
Ocho por radio (1933) [4:51]
Felipe VILLANUEVA (19th-20th Century)
Vals poetico [2:54]
Dietrich BUXTEHUDE (c.1637-1707)
Chaconne in E minor (orch.
CHÁVEZ, 1937) [7:43]
Orquesta Filarmónica de la ciudad de México/Enrique
Bátiz
CD 6 [62:34]
Manuel PONCE (1882-1948)
Piano Concerto (1912) [20:12]
Poema Elegiaco (1935) [8:04]
Balada Mexicana (1914) [11:25]
Danse des anciens mexicains (1933) [1:45]
Chapultepec (Tres bocelos sinfónicos) (1929 rev.1934) [14:42]
Jorge Federico Osorio (piano) (Concerto); §Eva Suk (piano)
(Balada)
The State of Mexico Symphony Orchestra/Enrique Bátiz
CD 7 [55:35]
Carlos CHÁVEZ (1899-1978)
Toccata for orchestra (1947) [6:47]
Paisajes Mexicanos (Variacones sinfónicas) (1973) [16:17]
La Hija de Cólquide (Suite-sinfónica) (1943) [23:12]
Cantos de México (1933) [4:03]
Baile (Cuadro sinfónico) (1953) [5:18]
Claudia Coonce (oboe) (Toccata)
The State of Mexico Symphony Orchestra/Enrique Bátiz
CD 8 [71:08]
Carlos CHÁVEZ (1899-1978)
Sinfonia de Antigona (1933) [13:15]
Symphony No. 4 "Sinfonia Romántica" (1954) [22:43]
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
Caminos (1934) [8:54]
Música para charlar (1938) [14:47]
Ventanas (1931) [10:16]
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1)
Orquesta Filarmónica de la ciudad de Mèxico/Enrique
Bátiz
various orchestras/Enrique
Bátiz
