Basque National Orchestra & Robert Treviño: Americascapes 2: American Opus
Ondine

This second chapter in the Americascapes series by conductor Robert Treviño and the Basque National Orchestra features three works by American composers George Walker, George Crumb, and Silvestre Revueltas. Each presents a fascinating world, is treated to a tremendous performance, and deserves to be heard alongside the more established works in the American classical repertoire. That these pieces are relatively little-known makes this recording all the more valuable. Whereas Walker's Address for Orchestra (1959) and Revueltas's La Coronela, Ballet (1940) are multi-movement pieces, Crumb's aptly titled A Haunted Landscape (1984) is in a standalone format.

The release booklet includes an in-depth contribution from Treviño, born in Texas to a Mexican family, that provides illuminating background and context. While he developed a strong kinship with Walker and Crumb through getting to know them personally, his relationship with Revueltas, who was Mexican and lived in Texas before eventually arriving in Chicago, derives more from the parallels between them. The conductor's fondness for Revueltas's music is so great, he reveals that since the age of nineteen he'd dreamed of one day recording his music. And now, in collaboration with the Basque National Orchestra, the esteemed symphonic ensemble he has led since 2017, he has done precisely that.

The address alluded to in Walker's title is, in fact, the Gettysburg Address, a fact that lends the work—the first orchestral work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer—extra levels of resonance and meaning; it also makes it an even more thoroughly American statement and thus a perfect fit for Treviño's series (an interesting point of comparison for Walker's piece is Copland's A Lincoln Portrait). Eighteen minutes long, the work was drafted by Walker in 1958, orchestrated a year later, and finally publicly performed in 1971. As the composer himself hoped Treviño would record Address for Orchestra, it make sense to mention the conductor's own take on the piece. After astutely noting the work's “forthrightness, clarity of purpose, directness, and a sense of optimistic belief in America's future,” he more imaginatively says that it's “a bit like looking at the Statue of Liberty in a cubist rendering, to the point that you can't easily tell that's what it is, but the spirit of liberty and freedom are clear.” There are passages of dramatic sweep and triumphant declaration but moments of tender lyricism too, all of it woven with the greatest care and precision into a dynamic and impeccable crafted statement. It is, like Walker's work in general, uncompromising but hardly inaccessible. Structurally a robust and mercurial opening movement leads into a calming “Molto adagio” of brief duration before moving into an at times ominous and volcanic “Dramatico.”

Listeners familiar with Crumb will know of his propensity for scores that eschew conventional notation for graphic visualizations and for his avowal of traditional structures. Emblematic of the composer's work, A Haunted Landscape augments the symphony orchestra with twenty percussion instruments to conjure its enigmatic sound world. Less a traditional classical composition and more a long-form soundscape that's tactile and painterly, the work opens quietly but quickly swells in intensity, every micro-detail deployed in service to the intended effect. That added percussion arsenal, by the way, is used judiciously to enhance the music's textural design, just as it should be. Music scholar Thomas May likened the nuance and specificity of Crumb's palette to Takemitsu's sound gardens, and certainly the comparison's supported by A Haunted Landscape in the patient sound sculpting that unfolds over its sixteen minutes. Haunted it is, though in drawing one so deeply into its realm, it registers like a sonic black hole as much as it does terrestrial landscape.

Revueltas never heard his final work La Coronela, Ballet (The Lady Colonel) as it received its premiere months after his premature death at the age of forty. Commissioned by Mexico's Fine Arts Ballet in 1939, the work is said to have been inspired by the illustrator José Guadalupe Posada's engravings and a story about a “people's revolution” that toppled a country's dictatorship. Its appeal is less due to the story associated with it, however, and more the action-packed score Revueltas fashioned for it. Presented in a reconstructed form (credited to Eduardo Hernández Moncada and José Limantour), the four-part ballet is a vibrant, polyglot work that ventures down a staggering number of stylistic alleyways during its thirty-three minutes. Whereas one episode might suggest a Mexican folk or Mariachi influence, others sound like they could have come from the pen of Copland or Stravinsky. With horns blaring and woodwinds and strings shrieking, certain passages suggest a mashup of Le Sacre du printemps and Petrushka. In stark contrast, others are so jovial they verge on cartoonish. Interestingly, some of the most appealing moments arise during the third movement, “La pesadilla de Don Ferruco (Don Ferruco's Nightmare),” when gentle waltz expressions evoke passages of similar character in Petrushka. Of all the movements, it's the concluding one, “El juicio final (The Last Judgement),” that's the most blustery, even though here too quiet moments surface. Regardless of the material, the Basque National Orchestra executes it with verve, purpose, and conviction, and as wildly wide-ranging as the work is, it's never less than entertaining.

According to Treviño, the list of musical choices he compiled over the course of a year while laying the groundwork for the release was enough to fill twelve Americascapes albums. That makes the three works he decided on all the more special and also suggests it's safe to assume the series will extend long past the second volume.

December 2024