August 31, 2015

  • Mexican Piano Music of the 19th & 20th Century

     

    Mexico Between Two Centuries
    Edison Quintana, piano.
    Urtext JBCC 243
    Total Time:  69:04
    Recording:   (*)***/****
    Performance: (*)***/****

    The Uruguayan-born pianist Edison Quintana has over the years recorded a number of albums exploring Classical and Contemporary music from Mexico, and Latin and South America.  In this new release, recorded in 2011, he has chosen an interesting and intelligent program of pieces spanning some 90 years of music (1890-1980) from twelve different composers.  The result is an intriguing disc of piano music from both familiar and less familiar composers whose music has indelibly been significant to Mexican art music.

    The first work on this recital is from 1893.  The Valse-capriccio by Ricardo Castro (1864-1907) is a classic romantic work that would become popular in its orchestral form in 1900 when Castro premiered it in Europe.  It serves as a good opening to the disc with its connection to salon-like musical virtuoso pianism.

    Manuel Ponce (1882-1948) is most well known for his guitar concerti.  His Romantic style, blended with Mexican folkloric melodies and rhythms has always captured an often more intimate musical aesthetic.  Several of his compositions are included here.  The first piece is an Intermezzo (published in 1923, but likely written the previous decade) which is followed by the Scherzino mexicano.  Both these works are still in Ponce’s more traditional romantic style and would become quite popular.  The Intermezzo No. 3 from 1921 appears later in the program and provides an example of the composer’s move to more modern styles, though it still has one foot firmly in Romantic piano literature.

    The music of Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) falls into a blend of modernism and folkloric rhythmic and musical inspirations.  The Tres piezas for piano included here have been ordered by Quintana.  The opening “Cancion” and closing “Allegro” were both published in 1939 at the height of the composer’s popularity.  The former is actually a fragment from the composer’s Cuauhnahuac.  The central “Adagio” was composed in 1918.  Together they provide a look at the modernism of Revueltas’ style that parallels some of Bartok’s folk-inspired work.

    At the center of the recital are selections of pieces that display the shift to more modernist aesthetics.  First is Micropiezas (1978) by contemporary composer Leonardo Velazquez (1935-2004).  The music explores modes and atonal writing within small contrasting units connected together into a brief work.  The composer’s Toccata (1975) bookends some of these modern styles with a more Baroque-like virtuosic displays reminiscent of music in the 1920s and 1930s.  It is actually a very engaging work.

    Jose Pablo Moncayo’s (1912-1958) brief Tres piezas por piano (1948) feature the sorts of irregular meter and shifts from complexity to utter simplicity are on display in these somewhat interconnected movements.  After the aforementioned Ponce intermezzo, the program moves to a more experimental composer, Manuel de Elias (b. 1939).  His Microestructuras (1966) are an example of the sort of serial composition of the period.  For contrast, Quintana then includes a more traditional work from the same decade, Mario Ruiz Armengol’s (1911-2002) Las frias montanas returning us to a simpler time.  The more familiar Sobre las olas (1891) by Juventino Rosas (1868-1894) recalls the great waltzes of the Strauss family, so much so that it was often thought to be by Johann Strauss.  More avant-garde music returns then in Simurg (1980), a work filled with contemporary technique and focused on a four-note idea introduced at the start in this piece by Mario Lavista (b. 1943).

    Mexican color and modernism blend in Costena (1962), a work by Eduardo Hernandez Moncada (1899-1995) where nationalism is at the heart of the intriguing rhythmic complexities in the music.  One of the pioneers of serial technique in Mexico was Carlos Jimenez Mabarak (1916-2004) and in his La fuente armoniosa we here him exploring this style with an impressionistic quality.  Elias’ Sonata breve (1958) closes off the program with its Prokofiev-like musical expression.

    This well-thought out program works quite well.  Sometimes it feels as if Quintana’s journey is also a sort of memoriam or remembrance of composers he has known in his career as well as an exploration of his own technical mastery of these many different styles.  One unfortunate thing though is that the tracks are not numbered on the CD cover or in the booklet making it harder to follow without counting through the list each time.  Some pedaling releases are also problematic at times and a couple of times it feels like excitement gets the better of climaxes.  The recording is well-balanced though in a couple instances the track ends abruptly without allowing a bit more ambience to flow from the end of the music and there are a couple of hard starts.  The result is an important release of rarely heard Mexican piano miniatures alongside more familiar works that surveys the wide range of stylistic and aesthetic influences on Mexican art music of the 20th Century.