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Articles
Los Angeles Times
January 8, 1998
In With the New: Santa Barbara Symphony takes a
measured approach to the unfamiliar
By Josef Woodard
 In
her few years at the helm of the Santa Barbara Symphony,
music director Gisèle Ben-Dor has taken a slow, smart
approach, taking care to program favorites, while also
inserting chancier music along the way. It's a game
of give-and-take undertaken by every conductor with
an ear for adventure but an awareness of the bottom
line.
This weekend's Santa Barbara Symphony program is one
of the most daring and important yet in the Ben-Dor
ear. The orchestra will give a U.S. premiere of the
ballet "La Coronela," by the respected and
iconoclastic Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940),
to be danced by the State Street Ballet. The day after
the concerts, the orchestra will record the piece for
its debut recording, on the Koch International label.
Ben-Dor couldn't have picked riper material with which
to launch the symphony's recording career. Revueltas,
who was active during the '30s, is a composer who has
been steadily gaining respect for his adventurous and
sometimes irreverent work. In his too-short career,
Revueltas managed the Bartok-ish feat of juggling folkloric
sensibilities with his own brand of modernism. It's
high time for rediscovery of his music.
"La Coronela" ("The Woman Colonel")
was premiered on Nov. 20, 1940, after the composer's
death of pneumonia, brought on by a hedonistic lifestyle.
His premature death leaves us wondering what was left
unwritten, unrealized. The Koch CD will also include
Revueltas' "Colorines," performed by the English
Chamber Orchestra under Ben-Dor's baton.
Like the better-known Mexican composer Carlos Chavez.
Revueltas drew on the inspiration of folk music but
took it in more challenging directions. An apt comparison
has often been made between the two noted Mexican composers
and Stateside contemporaries, that while Chavez's music
parallels that of Aaron Copland, Revueltas is along
the lines of the more experimental verve of Charles
Ives.
In the notes written by the composer in 1938, quoted
for the fine collection of string quartets played by
the Cuarteto Latinamericano on New Albion Records. Revueltas
relates, "I have had many teachers. The best of
them with no degrees, knew more than the others. For
that reason I have always had little respect for degrees.
Now after many years I still study, have teachers, write
music, dream of distant countries, and sometimes bang
on washtubs."
The Revueltas premiere is not the only refreshing quirk
on the symphony program, which will also feature the
Concert for Harmonica and Orchestra by Heitor Villa-Lobos.
Robert Bonfiglio will be the soloist on harmonica, a
too-rare visitor to the orchestral stage. The concert
will be the kickoff event of the Midwinter Music Festival
in Santa Barbara, which also includes a staging of Britten's
"The Turn of the Screw" at UCSB.
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