Silvestre Revueltas, Orchestral Music
Orquestra Sinfonica de Aguascalientes
Conductor: Enrique Barrios
Naxos 8.555917
Price UKP 4.99
Silvestre Revueltas was the most original and gifted composer to emerge in Mexico in the twentieth century. I might venture, without fear of exaggeration, that he deserves a place in the wider pantheon of great composers of the twentieth century. He has sometimes been described as a Mexican Stravinsky, but such a title does as little justice to him as it does to Stravinsky.
Revueltas was born in the province of Durango on the last day of the nineteenth century. He studied music and composition in Mexico and in the United States. It was here that he came into contact with contemporary musical trends emanating from Western Europe. Returning to Mexico in 1929 he divided his time between composition and conducting. He suffered consistently from ill-health, made worse by alcohol dependence. He died of pneumonia in October 1940, over two months away from his forty-first birthday. At his death he left many of his compositions unfinished or un-orchestrated, including the final piece on this disc.
Mexico presents a varied tapestry of cultural influences; indigenous, Hispanic and African are but three basic themes, and each has its sub-categories and shades of syncretism. Their manifestations are sometimes brutal and elemental, facets that were embraced unhesitatingly by Revueltas in his music.
The first work on the disc is probably one of Revueltas’ best known compositions: Sensemayá. It is based on the retelling of an Indian legend by Cuban poet Nicolas Guilln. Sensemayá describes the hunt by a priest of the snake into which he had transformed a girl who refused his advances. The work is a crescendo of rhythmic tension and excitement, culminating with the killing of the snake and the simultaneous death of the priest.
La Noche de las Mayas was originally composed for a film, and the suite was culled from the music by the Mexican conductor and composer Jose de Limantour. The music manifests the delicacy and ease with which Revueltas dealt with different materials. Noche de Jaranas or Night of Revelry is based on Mexican folk dances, yet behind the gaiety lurks a darker more primitive force represented by trombones and tubas. Noche de Yucatán is an evocation of the steamy aromatic jungles of the Yucatán peninsular inhabited by the Mayas. The final piece in the suite Noches de encantamiento shows Revueltas’ musical originality to the full. Although written in the 1930s it predates future musical developments by Steve Reich and Olivier Messiaen in Turangalila with its insistence on rhythm at the expense of everything else.
The final piece on the disc is a suite from the unfinished ballet La Coronela. Some of this music is close to Stravinsky, especially the Stravinsky of L’histoire du Soldat, but it is never imitative. Revueltas was committed to the social and humanitarian aims of the Mexican revolution, perhaps more so than those who sought to rule the nation while "institutionalizing" i.e. ignoring the tenets of that revolution. La Coronela was based on a novel depicting the struggle of the Mexican peasantry against the corrupt rule of President Diaz in the early twentieth centuries.
The playing of the Orquestra Sinfonica de Aguascalientes throughout deserves praise, but it is their interpretation of La Noche de Las Mayas which burns itself into memory. It is always precise, and never allows itself to fall into kitschy sentimentalism. Noche de encatamiento shows that they have one heck of a percussion section while the flute solo in the preceding Night of Yucatán is authentic and in no way flowery.
This disc is a real bargain, for many it will be a portal into a new barely-known musical world. This is what discovery is all about.