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Revueltas Festival
Reviews:
The Guardian (London)
Sixty years after his death, Silvestre Revueltas
is finally getting the acclaim he deserves. Andrew Clements
discovers one of the greats of Latin music
A modern mariachi.
Michael Nyman and the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen are
among Silvestre Revueltas' biggest fans. And yet, apart
from a handful of discs and the occasional appearance
in concert programs, his music is hardly known on this
side of the Atlantic. In the US and his native Mexico,
however, Revueltas' reputation is slowly being consolidated.
His centenary — he was born on New Year's Eve 1899
— has given the cause a decisive push. The recent
Revueltas festival in Santa Barbara included no fewer
than 18 of his works alongside other pieces from Latin
America, plus screenings of three films for which Revuletas
wrote the soundtracks, a puppet show and an exhibition
of manuscripts.
The connection between Revueltas and the Californian
city is conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor, the Uruguayan-born
musical director of the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra,
who has fervently championed his cause for years. It's
entirely due to Ben-Dor's energy and enthusiasm that
the Revueltas festival took shape: she planned and conducted
all the programs, and brought in the Revueltas scholar
Roberto Kolb-Neuhause from Mexico City to prepare new
editions for some of the works. It was a real labour
of love for all involved, and endlessly fascinating
and revealing for those like me who arrived knowing
barely a handful of Revueltas' pieces.
It turns out that the man was as colorful as the music
he wrote, and that the few of his pieces that are known
— the orchestral Sensemaya, the abrasive Ocho por
Radio, the naggingly compulsive Homenaje a Federico
Garcia Lorca — are by no means just inspired flashes
in the pan. In the 30s, the decade in which Revueltas
composed all his major works (he died of alcoholism
and pneumonia in 1940), he was a consistent and distinctive
voice in contemporary music. He work, like that of all
true originals, remains obstinately unclassifiable.
He's been called a Mexican Charles Ives, but that's
a misleading parallel. Ives regularly introduced popular
songs and hymn tunes into his scores as points of reference,
but he regarded himself as a high-art composer. Revueltas'
intentions were very different: he was aiming for a
genuine synthesis between popular Mexican music and
the Western art-music tradition. The bright, brittle
sound of his scoring, the complexity of his rhythms
and the acid tang of his harmonies owe as much to the
mariachi bands of northern Mexico as they do to the
modernist world of Stravinsky, Varese and Bartok, who
seem to have been his major European influences. His
body of work has a real radical agenda; Revueltas was
a revolutionary, and the barriers he sought to break
down were musical as well as social.
Born in the Mexican province of Durango, Revueltas
trained first as a violinist. He studied in the US and
remained there to earn his living conducting and playing
in theatre bands. During that time he composed very
little; the pieces that he did write have a vaguely
French flavour and, apart from the odd flash of sardonic
humour, neither show individuality nor hint at the music
to come. A little piano study from 1924 has no claim
to distinction apart from its title, Tragedy in the
Form of a Radish, which pokes not-so-gentle fun at Erik
Satie.
It was only after Revueltas returned home in 1929 to
become assistant conductor of the Mexico Symphony Orchestra
that his creativity exploded and the first distinctive
pieces began to appear. With his fellow conductor-composer
Carlos Chavez and painters like Diego Rivera and Frida
Kahlo, he championed the cause of a nationalist Mexican
art. When a left-wing government was elected in Mexico
in 1934 he began writing socialist realist music for
the state-sponsored cinema. Some of the films haven't
aged well, but Redes (one of Fred Zinnemann's early
successes as a director) was screened in Santa Barbara
with Revueltas' wonderfully paced, humane score played
live by the SBSO under Ben-Dor.
In the next five years Revueltas wrote another nine
film scores and a stream of concert works; in 1937 he
travelled to Spain to join the fight against Franco.
He was an alcoholic and possibly a manic depressive,
yet his music retained its ebullience to the end of
his short life. It'' in the clashing mariachi-isms of
Ocho, the busy, almost dangerously vapid outer sections
of Homenaje, framing a heart-felt lament for Lorca,
and the gentle, rather surreal humor of the children's
ballet The Wandering Tadpole.
Revueltas' pieces, their sound world, their collage-like
patterning of themes and essentially non-developmental
forms, are products of a genuinely modernist sensibility.
He often relies on three-part, fast-slow-fast structures,
but within that simple shape the ordering of events
and the shifts of perspectives have their own logic,
sometimes almost a constructivist basis.
Occasionally the language clings too closely to the
models: the recently rediscovered children's entertainment
Once Upon a Time There Was a King, from 1940, is heavily
mortgaged to Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale, while the
string-orchestra version of Cuauhnahuac (1931) sounds
more like Bartok than Revueltas. But a work like Planos
(1934), with its sensuous superposition of independent
rhythmic and melodic layers, or the explosive, virtuostic
Toccata (without a Fugue), a condensed, one-movement
violin concert from 1933, or the Two Little Serious
Pieces for wind (1940) which are anything but conventionally
serious, could only have been written by Revueltas.
Establishing the boundaries of that creative identity
was the Santa Barbara festival's aim. The programmes
were sometimes too long (prefacing the screening of
Redes with the US premiere of Villa-Lobos's interminably
rambling Tenth Symphony was a mistake) and the performances
weren't always perfect: this is music that requires
rhythmic tautness of a very special order, and the kind
of technical expertise that makes the hardest passages
seem effortless. They they demonstrated inescapably
that this is important, devastatingly endearing music.
There's no doubt that alongside the Argentinian Astor
Piazzolla, and (on a good day) the Brazilian Villa-Lobos,
Revueltas is the most considerable figure that Latin
American music has yet produced.
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