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Revueltas Festival
Reviews:
Scherzo Music Review (Madrid)
Revueltas Festival in California
From the 20th to the 23rd of January 2000, the small
city of Santa Barbara celebrated a Revueltas Festival
promoted by the active Gisèle Ben-Dor, [musical] director
of the city's symphony orchestra, steadily committed
to the programming of Latin-American music. Performance
of the Mexican composer's music (whose 100th birthday
was on December 31, 1999) in the United States can be
appreciated in two ways: as a genuine revelation to
an Anglo-Saxon public ignorant of the very existence
of his transcendental figure in the art of 20th-century
Mexican music; and as the possibility of preserving
a cultural legacy which the numerous Mexican immigrants
in California are in danger of losing. The double purpose
was implemented by an intelligent and appealing apportionment
of events among the most interesting spots in the city:
the University of [California at] Santa Barbara (where
Karl Geiringer worked), the old Franciscan Mission,
[the] Arlington Theatre (an astonishing specimen of
neo-Andalucian or "Spanish" Californian architecture),
and other theatres and auditoriums.
As noted in two fascinating lectures by the Mexican
Professor Roberto Kolb-Neuhause (of Viennese ancestry)
— one of the world's greatest authorities on Revueltas'
music, who is currently preparing a critical edition
— the composer's style is most advanced and original
in his chamber works, much as his film work remains
within a more conventional structure. Nevertheless,
inclusion in the Festival of three films with Revueltas
scores furnished the opportunity of bringing [his film
music] to a wider public, as films continue generating
great interest in the United States. Vamonos con
Pancho Villa (Fernando de Puentes, 1935) relies
on a "Mexicanistic" score that eloquently illustrates
the pessimistic image of the Revolution as devouring
its own offspring. One sequence allows a fleeting glimpse
of Revueltas as a piano player in a bar. La noche
de los mayas (Chano Ureta, 1939) spurred the composer
into a slightly stereotyped mixture of fabricated pre-Columbian
music, but the picture's very script is another commonplace
— a Mayan tribe living in Arcadian bliss until
its encounter with the corrupting white man. Nor is
plot the most important aspect of Redes (Fred
Zinnemann and Emilio Gomez Muriel, 1934), a formidable
achievement on the aesthetic plane — "a mural painted
in movement," as Professor Kolb-Neuhaus put it —
to accompany a naïve attempt to organise a trade union
encouraged by the government. Enhancing the spare dialogue,
Ben-Dor and the Santa Barbara Symphony brought alive
Revueltas' poetic and effective music, with first-rate
synchronization. The other work on the program, Villa-Lobos'
Tenth Symphony, had a rather pallid reading (impaired
by the Arlington's poor acoustics), for a work more
of effects than of true musical content. Another Villa-Lobos
work programmed for the Festival met better fortune
— the Quartet No.5, in the care of nameless group
(members of the Symphony), possessing a contagious rhythmic
vitality. The two Revueltas works interpreted by these
musicians, Quartets Nos. 2 and 4, received vibrating
approaches that made clear the modernity of their dissonances
and "stridencies." The session also included Clocks
(1998), for piano (Alfredo Oyaguez) and strings, an
amusing work, ingenuous to a degree, of Miguel del Aguila.
A varied chamber ensemble (similarly drawn from the
city's orchestra) played a most interesting panorama
of Revueltas' most advanced (and humourous) music —
Ocho por radio, Tragedia en forma de rabano (no is
plagio) [Tragedy in the Form of a Radish, No Plagiarism
Intended], and Toccata sin fuga — meeting as
many difficult challenges as before, thanks to their
musicality. It is in these pieces that Revueltas' personality
is unique in its syncretism, which sets him apart as
much from the "Mexicanistic" reference as from the European
tradition.
The offering for the children's audience (which turned
out en masse), with the Espiral Puppet Theatre,
the percussion group Tambuco, and members of the Santa
Barbara Symphony led by Gisèle Ben-Dor, was surely the
most successful, with respect to the Festival's second
sociological objective. Besides the delicious realisations
of Once There Was a King and The Wandering
Tadpole (a work Revueltas himself introduced during
his stay in Spain in 1937, in the midst of the civil
war), perhaps most interesting was the opportunity to
become acquainted with the chamber version of Sensemaya,
a version that reduces the strength and colouring of
the original symphonic poem, but which cleverly adapts
itself in juxtaposition to a puppet theatre.
The Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra, with the indefatigable
Ben-Dor, who conducted three concerts that day, also
put up on their music stands other typical works from
the Revueltas catalogue: Cuauhnahuac, Homage
to Federico Garcia Lorca (a score also introduced
to some Spanish audiences during the [civil] war), and
Musica para charlar. The astonishing percussion
quartet Tambuco, capable of making music only with their
arms and a table, was in charge of the second part of
this concert: Thierry de May's Musique de tables,
in which they began to frame a fugue, and then, with
Eduardo Soto-Millan's Corazon Sur, proceeded
to plunge the audience completely into a magic ritual.
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