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Revueltas Festival
Reviews:
Santa Barbara's Gisèle Ben-Dor makes her case
by Richard S. Ginell
Until not too long ago, Silvestre Revueltas, the incorrigible,
left-leaning, wildly gifted and, alas, alcoholic Mexican
composer, languished in the shadow of his onetime friend
and eventual rival Carlos Chavez — known mostly,
if at all, for the brief, rocking socking tone poem
Sensemaya. Euro/North American disdain toward
music from the Latin world had something to do with
this neglect — and no doubt Revuletas also made
powerful enemies during a turbulent life that ended
ignominiously and prematurely at age 40.
He was born New Year's Eve 1899, and would have had
a good, bitter last laugh had he lived until his centenary.
In Southern California at least, he is becoming a hero
to Latinos and anxious marketing types trying to build
an audience for classical music from that group; indeed
Sensemaya is practically basic repertoire here
now. Isa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic
put out a decent CD survey of his music (Sony) last
year, and Revueltas has gone over well at the Chandler
Pavilion and the Hollywood Bowl. Yet it was Santa Barbara
that has produced the most impressive Revueltas project
so far — a four-day festival of orchestra nad chamber
music concerts, lectures, films, exhibits of manuscripts,
US premieres — the works — from January 20
to 23.
Gisèle Ben-Dor, the Urugay-born music director of the
Santa Barbara Symphony, had pushed for this festival
for years, and after accumulating goodwill chits from
the local audience while sprinkling increasing amounts
of Revueltas ino her programs, she finally went for
broke, pulling in several of the small city's performing
arts organizations. She is the most persuasive Revueltas
conductor I've ever heard, completely in touch with
the sarcastic wit, the malicious bite, the bounce of
the rhythms, the strong Mexican folk flavor, and in
some of the film music, the stirring heroism. She also
has a strong constitution; at one point, she led four
concerts in a span of roughly 25 hours, two of them
virtually back-to-back.
The festival's final day offered the greatest concentration
of music by far, starting with a family concert that
banished the old stereotype of easy-listening, spoon-fed
warhorses designed for short attention spans. Ben-Dor
and a small band of players from the Santa Barbara Symphony
delivered such tough little workouts as Planos
and the rare, chamber-sized, shortened edition of Sensemaya,
both of them without compromise and with especially
barbed menace in the latter. She enhanced, but did not
sweeten, the deal by sharing the split stage of the
aging yet acoustically solid Santa Barbara Junior High
Auditorium with shadow dancers Maria and Carmen Solis
in Planos, and the colorful, bizarre antics of
the Espiral Puppet Theater in Sensemaya. In league
with a somewhat confusing display by the puppets, she
made some news with the US premiere of the unfinishsed
incidental music to Once Upon a Time There Was a
King — one of Revuletas' last works, discovered
only in late 1999 — whose nifty rhythmic mockery
reminded me of L'Histoire du Soldat. The concluding
Wandering Tadpole unleashed more sarcastic humor
and polyrhythmic Mexican brio.
Stepping away from Revueltas, but not the Latin agenda,
at the Arlington Theater down-town, Ben-Dor led the
first US performance of Villa-Lobos' huge, rambling,
restless, unabashedly melodic Symphony No. 10, Amerindia,
which takes the composer's usual lushly foliated mannerisms
and multiplies them over a 58-minute span. Seeminly
taking his cue from Mahler to embrace an entire world.
Villa-Lobos wrote an exotic "Symphony of a Thousand"
for the founding of Sao Paulo that could double as a
travelog, using a large orchestra, three choruses, three
vocal soloists, and a wild tri-lingual text (in Portuguese,
Latin, and Tup Indian dialect) punctuated by erotic,
wind-swept, wordless choral swoops. Ben-Dor was scheduled
to make the first-ever recording of the piece for Koch
International here after the festival, and she evidently
grasped its vast, buckling dimensions completely, though
the Santa Barbara Symphony showed some audible strain.
The gusty, long-winded Villa-Lobos gave way in the
second half to the earnestly crusading side of Revueltas
with a screening of the 1935 film Redes (or "Nets"),
accompanied by a live performance of his reconstructed
cures. Along with obvious period agitprop elements —
poor Mexican fishermen trying to unionize against greedy
middlemen — the film contains striking imagery
of the sea and skies, and Revueltas' first-rate score,
one of the most satisfying every written for film, packs
a heroic emotional punch. The performance was in almost
perfect sync with the film, right down to matching the
rhythm of the rowboats.
While the Arlington was packed for this spectacular,
only a handful turned out at the junior high for the
concluding concert of zesty Revueltas chamber orchestra
pieces (it was, after all, a rainy Sunday night before
a work day). Ben-Dor and the very good Santa Barbara
Chamber Orchestra could claim another US premiere with
the string orchestra version of the Aztec-flavored Cuauhnahuac
- which is quite different from the more common orchestral
edition, lengthier by about five minutes, with a quiet
ending for solo cello and double bass instead of the
razzmatazz orchestral coda. Ben-Dor's performance was
packed with vigorous rhythmic feeling and in the more
lyrical pentatonic stretches, a Copland-like sense of
vastness.
The more or less familiar Homenaje a Federico Garcia
Lorca was given a bumping, raucous, streetwise performance
full of sass and vinegar. Ben-Dor brought out the discordant
hijinks in the clownish pratfalls of Troka —
Revueltas could be as funny as Shostakovich — and
concluded with the homier country scenes and mysterious
cues of Musica Para Charlar (from the documentary
Ferrocarriles de Baja California).
As a festival nightcap, the marvelous Mexican percussion
group Tambuco delivered some choice, swinging minimalism
(Graham Fitkin's Hook); a piece for four scrapers
played in the physical positions of a string quartet
(Leopoldo Novoa's Sabe como e?); a surprisingly
satisfying piece for three musicians playing a table
— or table-six-hands, as it were (Thierry de May's
Musique de Tables); and a mesmerizing ritual
(Eduardo Soto-Millan's Corazon Sur) for quartets
of drums, woodblocks, cowbells, and crotales.
I'm convinced that the current mushrooming interest
in Latin music of all idioms, coupled with burgeoning
Latino population statistics, is going to produce a
bumper crop of Latin American classical music devotees,
soon. And with this triumphant Revueltas Festival, along
with recordings like 1998's sizzling Conifer disc of
Ginastera's complete Estancia, Gisèle Ben-Dor
promises to be a major player in that ballpark.
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