El árbol de la vida - Music from Mexico (Moncayo, Vázquez, Castro, Revueltas, Iannarelli)

El árbol de la vida - Music from Mexico

Jose Pablo MONCAYO (1912-1958)

Huapango (1941)

Herbert VAZQUEZ (b.1963)

El Árbol de la Vida

for amplified guitar and orchestra (2015)*

Ricardo CASTRO (1864-1907)

Minuetto, Op. 23 (1904)

Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940) 

La noche de los Mayas (1939)

 

Simone IANNARELLI (b.1970)

El ultimo cafe juntos

(Version for guitar and string orchestra 

of Italian Coffe No.5: l'ultimo caffe insieme) (2007)*

Pablo Garibay (guitar)*

Orquesta Juvenil Universitaria Eduardo Mata

Gustavo Rivero Weber

The impetus of the Mexican Revolution galvanised the use of indigenous melodies in a new and original wave of musical compositions that loosened dependence on European models. José Moncayo’s infectiously joyful Huapango, one of Mexico’s best-known works is, in its distinct national character, deeply rooted in folk music. Silvestre Revueltas’s La noche de los mayas is a symphonic suite derived from film music that employs Mexican percussion instruments in a vividly inventive way. The process of linking folk influence with classical techniques continues to the present day with Hebert Vázquez’s El árbol de la vida which uses the folk style known as the son.

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Mexico gained its tradition of art music slowly, though European music had naturally been present there from the time of the appearance of the Spaniards on Mexican shores. The gradual move away from dependence on European models was given impetus by the Mexican Revolution (which lasted for ten years from 1910), following the 35-year-long regime of Porfirio Díaz. Amongst composers who began to investigate more authentically Mexican inspiration were Manuel Ponce (1882–1948) and Candelario Huízar (1883–1970). Huízar in particular began to use indigenous melodies in his work, thus initiating a new and highly original wave of composition.

One of the composers whom Huízar influenced was José Pablo Moncayo. His life was tragically short: born in Guadalajara in 1912, he died in 1958 in Mexico City. He studied at the National Conservatory and privately, and worked as a jazz pianist to earn money. His brief but infectiously joyful Huapango, one of the most celebrated of Mexican compositions, was written in 1941, and dedicated to the state of Veracruz. The material for the work came from a visit Moncayo made with fellow composer Blas Galindo to Alvarado, in order to collect folk music; huapango is a dance belonging to the son huasteco style, and there are a number of variations of it, for variously sized groups of musicians from a trio up to a mariachi band.

It proved very difficult for Moncayo and Galindo to transcribe what they heard, however, since the music was never performed the same way twice. Moncayo sought the advice of Candelario Huízar, who suggested that he set the material out initially as he had heard it, and then develop it according to his own wishes, which is precisely what he did. While Moncayo was one of a number of Mexican nationalist composers (including Galindo), and while he is one of the ‘trinity’ of internationally recognised Mexican composers, together with Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez, it can be said that Huapango has a very specifically national character, using as it does, genuine folk themes (including El Gavilán, Siqui Sirí and Balajú), and its particular treatment of trumpet and trombone and unpitched percussion is clearly inspired by the sound of Mexican popular bands.

The interest in linking Mexican folk music with more classical techniques has continued to the present day. El árbol de la vida (‘The Tree of Life’) by Hebert Vázquez (born in 1963) is a fine example. Scored for amplified guitar and orchestra, its inspiration is of a mythological nature, and more specifically, it springs from the writing of Elisabeth Haich (1897–1994), graphically suggesting (notably in the intricate writing for winds and harp at the beginning) the manifold branches of a tree whose roots extend deep into the ground. The piece is dedicated to the guitarist on this recording, Pablo Garibay.

Part way into the work there is a quotation from a vivacious son, a particular folk style from Veracruz, entitled El cascabel (‘The Bell’). The composer notes that ‘it portrays the irresistible force of life’, and its entirely organic irruption into this initially dark, brooding work certainly suggests that; the son is later combined with the work’s opening music to represent the positive and negative aspects of the tree of life intertwined, also affording the composer an opportunity to display his outstanding orchestral skills. The rhythm of the son in fact takes the piece over, and the end is as enigmatic as the beginning.

Ricardo Castro (Rafael de la Santísima Trinidad Castro Herrera) was born just under a century before Vázquez, and died in 1907. He studied at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, where he proved to be so talented that he finished his studies in half the usual time, graduating in 1883, having already begun his career as a pianist and composer. His Symphony No. 1 in C minor was completed in that same year. His style is very definitely European Romantic—Germanic, in fact—and very colourful. He was the author of the first Latin American piano concerto, and the first Mexican cello concerto.

Castro’s Minuetto is every inch an elegant salon piece in the European style; its inclusion on this recording makes the point that without music built on this debt to composers of the Old World, the technical basis for composers who came later and built a genuinely national Mexican style (the ‘indigenists’) would not have existed.

The hugely original Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940), born in Durango, did not study in Mexico, but in Chicago, and worked as a violinist in the United States before returning to his native country to write music in 1940. His compositional life was a short one, and he died in poverty in Mexico City in 1940. His work integrates European-derived Modernism—he was in touch with Varèse, and very much aware of what was happening in the wider world—with Mexican folk traditions (including mariachi brass bands) in an extraordinarily inventive way.

In 1939, the year before he died, Revueltas composed the score for a film, La noche de los mayas by Chanu Urueta. Though a version of the music, a two-movement suite, was initially made by Paul Hindemith, the symphonic suite (in effect a four-movement symphony) which is heard nowadays was made after the composer’s death by José Yves Limantour (1919–1976), who conducted the first performance in 1961 in Guadalajara. The music evokes the culture of the Mayas, making use of a wide array of percussion instruments in particular: the score is coloured not only by xylophone and many kinds of drums, bongos, congas and tom-toms, but also indigenous Mexican percussion instruments such as the guiro (a gourd), and also the caracol (conch shell), the latter particularly important in the final movement.

The work is cast in four movements, the first, Noche de los mayas, beginning with ominous percussion blows but thereafter evoking an ominously tense but trance-like state. The second, Noche de jaranas is a frenzied dance, with constantly changing metres and a colourful use of brass and woodwind characteristic of Mexican bands. This is followed by a sensual, nocturnal movement, Noche de Yucatán the only one to employ a genuine Maya melody; Revueltas made a point of avoiding the use of indigenous materials in general. Noche de encantamiento the final movement, dramatically suggests a sinister magic ritual, working up a frenzied dance from initial chaos, with driving percussion and an obbligato for the conch shell, almost like the fulfilment of the promise of the first movement: it is music quite unlike any other.

Simone Iannarelli was born in Rome in 1970, and is currently professor of guitar at the Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Colima in Mexico. El último café juntos, or, in its original Italian, L’ultimo caffè insieme, is dedicated to the memory of the renowned French guitarist Roland Dyens (1955–2016), with whom Iannarelli studied in Paris. It is a lyrical and nostalgic evocation of a last coffee between master and pupil, and exists in versions both for solo guitar and guitar with string orchestra, as recorded here: this gives an opportunity for the strings to reflect upon and amplify some of the melodic gestures and harmonic movements of the soloist while retaining the music’s essentially intimate character. This version is dedicated to Pablo Garibay.

Ivan Moody