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Reviews
The Los Angeles Times
Revealing a Lot About Revueltas
Revueltas Festival, January 25, 2000
Mark Swed
 To
head in the direction of downtown Santa Barbara for
musical revelations about the 20th century is something
new. But it is to Santa Barbara one goes these days
to find out about some of the more astonishing aspects
of Latin American music of the past century, thanks
to the advocacy of the Santa Barbara Symphony's Uruguayan
music director, Gisèle Ben-Dor'. An enterprising conductor,
she can be counted upon to unearth something important
every season. But this year she has done much more,
with a four-day Silvestre Revueltas Music Festival that
ended Sunday.
The festival was a centennial celebration of a great
Mexican composer, born on the last day of the 19th century,
whose voice has only recently become widely heard. A
Grammy-nominated recording of Revueltas' music by the
Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen is helping,
but there is still much to learn about this composer
who filtered indigenous Mexican musics through a dazzling
modernist sensibility.
Revueltas was a romantic figure who could almost have
been invented by Hollywood. A political radical and
artist who was part of the same revolutionary culture
as Diego Rivera, a fighter in the Republican struggle
in Spain against Franco, a manic-depressive and alcoholic,
and, as Steven Ledbetter wrote in his fascinating and
detailed festival program notes, a "very difficult
man to deal with on a social level," Revueltas
produced a blaze of important music in the last nine
years of a short life (he died at 40). The "genius
under the volcano who was ruined by alcohol" is
the memorable phrase of Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus, a Revueltas
authority who was on hand for the festival.
Even a brief visit to the festival Sunday for its last
two concerts was enough to reveal just how remarkable
a figure Revueltas was. Among Revueltas' great achievements
was his film music, although the 10 films he scored
are virtually unknown in America. His first, "Redes"
(Nets), is a classic, but even that is rarely seen.
It was shot in Mexico in 1934 by photographer Paul Strand
and co-directed by a young Fred Zinnemann (of "High
Noon" fame) and Emilio Gomez Muriel. Revueltas'
score to it is mainly known through a suite made by
the great Austrian conductor Erich Kleiber.
For the festival, however, the complete score was restored
and performed in accompaniment with a screening of the
hour-long film as part of a wildly ambitious Santa Barbara
Symphony afternoon program in the Arlington Theater.
"Redes," which has little dialogue, is a stark,
haunting documentary-like depiction of the class struggle
of Veracruz fishermen. It is a story told in strong
images of sea and sky, of greed and suffering. The gripping
music of tense sinew, angry but compassionate lyricism,
ingratiating fold song undercut by harsh violence, is
a crucial element, and its visceral sonic power makes
this one of the most compelling experiments in restoring
live music with cinema.
It was also Ben-Dor's intention to place Revueltas
within a larger context of major Latin American musical
statements, and for the first half of the concert, she
retrieved an amazing one, Villa-Lobos' massive Symphony
No. 10 ("Amerindia"). This is the monster
of Villa-Lobos' 11 symphonies, and Ben-Dor's performance
was its U.S. premiere.
"Amerindia" lasts nearly an hour; it requires
a huge orchestra, a large chorus and vocal soloists.
Written in 1952 for the 400th anniversary of the founding
of Saw Paulo, the symphony attempts to grasp four centuries
of Brazilian culture and myth through a host of musical
styles, and as so often is the case in Villa-Lobos,
Afro-Brazilian rhythms cozy up to Bach. There are pages
of text in Latin, modern Portuguese and the Tupi dialect.
Magical monkey legends here; Marian poems there. The
second part of the five-part symphony is a war cry.
The last ends with a great, inspiring Alleluia.
It is hard to know what to make of it all. Villa-Lobos'
flair for the dramatic pulls one in, but he doesn't
always work at the same level of inspiration. It was
even harder to know what to make of it from this performance.
Ben-Dor is an enthusiastic, forceful conductor, but
her industry isn't matched by her resources. The Santa
Barbara Symphony, the various choruses and soloists
(tenor Carlo Scibelli and bass Nmon Ford Livene) all
struggled valiantly. It was also a problem for the audience
not to be able to follow the text, printed in tiny type,
in a very darkened hall.
Sunday evening, Ben-Dor presented a different sort
of context, this time with Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra
playing Revueltas, followed by mostly Latin American
percussion music by the Tambucio Percussion Quartet
of Mexico, at the Santa Barbara Junior High School Auditorium.
The chamber orchestra proved on even shakier ground
than its big brother. Still, one got the point with
the US premiere of "Cuauhnahuac" in its string
orchestra version. Written in 1931, this is Revueltas'
first major score, and it is an early, mostly successful,
attempt to mix cultures, that finds similarities in
pre-Hispanic and modernist musics but also has great
fun exploiting their jolting differences. Seven years
later, in "Troka" and "Musica Para Charlar"
("Chit-Chat Music"), which followed on the
program, Revueltas had found a hundred frisky, entertaining
and inventive ways to accomplish that.
The Tambuco had less interesting music to play. These
percussion pieces were often just extensions of a single
notion, tapping on a table or, in Colombian composer
Leopoldo Novoa's "Sabe como e'?" (You Know
What I mean?) rasping on guacharacas. But here
the virtuosity and theatricality of the players compensated.
Put Ben-Dor and her enthusiasms together with players
of this caliber and Santa Barbara could really produce
a world-class festival.
See what the critics in the US are saying:
International Reviews:
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