Jimmy López Bellido: Symphonic Canvas
MSR Classics

In liner notes included with Symphonic Canvas, Jimmy López Bellido observes that “composers only get to write one first symphony and one first opera”—an obvious point perhaps yet one still worth making, insofar as it emphasizes the significance of the orchestral works on the release, both of them world premiere recordings: his first symphony and a three-movement suite based on his first opera. That detail alone makes Symphonic Canvas an important addition to his discography. It's not, however, the first release devoted exclusively to his orchestral music, that distinction falling to a 2105 Harmonia Mundi release presenting three world-premiere recordings performed by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra.

A Lima, Peru native, Jimmy López Bellido first studied at the city's National Conservatory of Music, after which he earned his Master of Music degree at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and his Doctorate in Music at the University of California-Berkeley. His two Symphonic Canvas pieces receive authoritative performances by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who brings three decades of podium experience to the project. The two works carry with them extra-musical associations, the forty-year-old composer having drawn for inspiration from Cervantes for Symphony No.1 - The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda (2016) and Ann Patchett for Bel Canto - A Symphonic Canvas (2017).

The composer was obsessed with Don Quixote as a teenager, but it's Cervantes' final novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (completed a mere three days before the Spanish writer's death in 1616), that provided the groundwork for the forty-five-minute homage. While the detailed narrative recounts the many adventures of the titular couple, Mr. López didn't write the work so that its content would replicate the novel's plot development; instead, he aspired to distill the spirit of the book into musical form and capture its greatness and humour. Furthermore, he stresses that the listener should be free to experience the symphony as “an abstract musical work that stands on its own” and not worry about being unfamiliar with the novel.

I fully concur with the composer in that regard, having determined even before reading his comment that the work loses nothing when broached in purely musical terms with the extra-musical dimension omitted. When heard in this manner, the work impresses as a classic symphony whose four movements alternate between weighty thematic gestures and spirited episodes. One comes away from the material locating Jimmy López Bellido within the grand symphonic tradition associated with Sibelius, Mahler, and the like rather than Schoenberg-styled serialism or Glass-related minimalism.

Its opening movement even evokes Mahler's own first symphony when it starts with an undercurrent of low-pitched strings. As the work advances, it turns eerie in a manner not unlike the slow fugue that begins Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Unabashedly dramatic, the symphony progresses through multiple episodes, the music brooding and powered by a phalanx of percussive forces. While the composer deploys dissonance to convey turbulence, restful passages also surface to settle the nerves. The intensity of the stormy opening movement is alleviated by delicate interplay between woodwinds, harp, and strings during the initial part of the adagio-styled second movement, though here too the music gradually exudes intensity as agitation creeps in; again, one hears a rather Mahler-like character in the string writing, especially when the tone turns anguished. The mood brightens considerably with the exuberant third movement, a spirited scherzo sprinkled with ample percussive detail (bongos, tympani, et al.) and aggressive, Cuban-flavoured dance rhythms, after which the fourth caps the symphony with a prototypically energized and oft-rousing allegro.

In being a condensed instrumental treatment of the composer's first opera, the Bel Canto suite likewise allows the work to be experienced sans programmatic details, even if in this case the essence of the storyline has been retained in the thirty-minute version. Patchett based her novel on real-life events that occurred in Lima in 1996-97 when hundreds of guests attending a party at the official residence of the Japanese ambassador to Peru were taken hostage by revolutionary guerrillas (in Patchett's book, American soprano Roxanne Cross is present at the party to perform). While Mr. López surmises that listeners familiar with the opera will be able to identify the overall arc of the story in the suite, those unacquainted with it will likely find the instrumental treatment “entirely satisfying on its own.”

It's certainly easy to visualize the drama of the hostage-taking moments during the dramatic first movement (which includes the shooting of Roxanne's accompanist), but it's the thirteen-minute central part, “La Garúa,” that's the most affecting of the three. During this extended presentation, lyrical solo passages for oboe, flute, bassoon, and strings accentuate the composer's heartfelt expressions to stirring effect. Action naturally heats up again for the final movement, “The End of Utopia,” especially when the music deals with the violent resolution of the crisis and the subsequent freeing of the hostages. One final plaintive section captures Cross's heartbreak as she surveys the desolation of the setting, her aria largely voiced by trumpet in this non-vocal treatment.

September 2019