Review: What is Pan-American music? Gustavo Dudamel and pianist Gabriela Martinez have some ideas

Pete Seeger’s legendary “We Shall Overcome” live performance at Carnegie Corridor in 1963, the occasion that signaled the indispensable method music might encourage ’60s-era political reform, ended on an exceptionally excessive level. The eloquent, certainly definitive, efficiency of the patriotic Cuban music “Guantanamera” made each syllable in José Martí’s poems consequential. Seeger, nevertheless, launched the music by saying “individuals” had put one in every of Martí’s final poems to a preferred tune. It wasn’t “individuals,” it was Julián Orbón.

Orbón is duly credited on the jacket of the live performance’s stay recording. Possibly Seeger had a thoughts slip. Possibly he had an issue with Orbón. Possibly there may be simply an Orbón downside, which might clarify why Julián Orbón de Soto, who was born within the Asturias area of Spain in 1925, moved together with his household to Havana in 1938 and rose to be thought-about by many to be the nation’s most promising younger composer, has been unjustly uncared for.

That injustice was addressed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Live performance Corridor Thursday evening, the primary live performance in Gustavo Dudamel’s new Pan-American Music Initiative. This system ended with a stirring efficiency of Orbón’s “Tres Versiones Sinfónicas.” Orbón was simply 28 when he wrote the rating and gave it its sadly uninspiring title describing it as merely three diverse symphonic items.

Even within the Pan-American Initiative — which isn’t a pageant however a broad, ongoing effort at inclusivity — Orbón appeared an afterthought. The night, which started the L.A. Phil’s fall season, was to have been devoted completely to Venezuelan, Mexican and Brazilian composers. But in a late change of path, Dudamel as an alternative led John Adams’ “I Nonetheless Dance,” Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto in addition to his “Serenata Notturna” and the Orbón.

As luck would have it, Saturday evening on the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage, the Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Martinez performed an intriguingly unique Pan-American program that mixed works by Venezuelan and Brazilian composers with current ones from the U.S.

Dudamel and Martinez increase the query of what it means to be Pan-American. Virgil Thomson outlined American music as music written by an American.

Is Reynaldo Hahn’s “Portraits de Peintres,” which Martinez performed, Venezuelan? The composer was born in Caracas and emigrated to Paris in his youth. These piano miniatures are musical impressions of 4 early poems by Proust about painters (for a short time, Hahn and Proust had been lovers). On the floor, they sound as French as Ravel, who was a classmate of Hahn’s. However they don’t sound like Ravel. It’s exhausting to say whether or not there’s a trace of Venezuelan affect in Hahn’s effervescent melodies and vibrating accompaniments, or whether or not it simply appears that method realizing Hahn’s origins.

“Tres Versiones” provides an enchanting rabbit gap of musical influences and identities through which to get misplaced. The primary motion, “Pavana,” begins with melody by the Spanish Renaissance composer Luis de Milán magisterially belted out by French horns and accented off the beat in its final notes, ending on a punctuated Coplandesque chord by piano and harp. The 12 months was 1953, the 12 months of Castro’s “Historical past Will Absolve Me” speech.

The Orbóns had fled Spanish Civil Conflict, and Julián grew to become an keen preliminary supporter of the Cuban Revolution. The Milán tune is steadily given the complete Copland remedy, virtually changing into a fanfare for the frequent Cuban.

Probably the most astonishing motion, the second, is titled “Organum-Conductus.” It begins, mystically, with a chant melody by the novel twelfth century composer Pérotin, who would turn out to be a seminal affect on Steve Reich and the event of American Minimalism a dozen years later. In Orbón’s arms, Pérotin takes on symphonic rapture, rising ever extra euphoric and extra boldly coloured. The final motion, “Xylophone,” is an Afro-Cuban dance made distinctive by a big contingent of percussion.

Having grown disillusioned by the Cuban Revolution, Orbón left in 1960 for Mexico Metropolis. He moved to New York the 12 months of Seeger’s Carnegie live performance and taught at Columbia College till his dying in 1991. In New York, he was considered a Spanish Neoclassicist. Dudamel made it thrillingly evident that Orbón must be reconsidered as one thing like a pan-Spanish-Cuban-American and neo-Medieval-Renaissance Modernist.

Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp may on first blush appear an applicable Neoclassical Pan-American match, since flute and harp are widespread devices in Latin, folks, pop, jazz and classical musics. Besides Mozart hated each devices. That nevertheless, didn’t cease principal flutist Denis Bouriakov and principal harpist Emmanuel Ceysson from delivering a vibrant efficiency. Plus, Ceysson’s Artwork Deco purple harp seems like it could have properly slot in at a Nineteen Fifties Havana evening membership.

Adams’ “I Nonetheless Dance” was written in 2018 to have fun Michael Tilson Thomas and his husband, Joshua Robison. A curtain-raiser, it helped launch MTT’s final season because the transformative music director of the San Francisco Symphony. The influences should not Latin (though there may be loads of that in Adams’ beloved oratorio, “El Niño”), however is extra within the spirit of Duke Ellington, with African and Japanese percussion, together with an electrical bass guitar, thrown right into a blazing orchestral combine that doesn’t cease for near eight minutes.

Tilson Thomas performed it as a type of fantasy, a luminous imaginative and prescient of the ballroom. Every thing goes by very quick. The rhythms are mind-bending. It takes virtuoso listening to simply to comply with the rating. However for Dudamel, this was no fantasy. “I Nonetheless Dance” grew to become “I Dance.”

The unique L.A. Phil program would have ended with a Villa-Lobos’ Chôros No. 10. As a substitute, Tilson Thomas, who remarkably nonetheless conducts regardless of grappling with mind most cancers, will conduct it with the L.A. Phil in January. However Martinez crammed the void for now by ending her Broad program with Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras” No. 4 in its unique piano model.

She is a outstanding pianist who has had a great deal of publicity however stays for some mysterious motive on the sideline. Saturday was a return to the Broad. She’s carried out on the Soraya and as soloist with the Pasadena Symphony and the Pacific Symphony. She’s not exhausting to seek out on YouTube. However regardless of having been a soloist for Dudamel in Venezuela, she has but to look with the L.A. Phil or in Disney Corridor.

Primarily based in New York, Martinez is attuned to its new music scene, and she or he included brief items by Missy Mazzoli (“Heartbreaker”), Caroline Shaw (“Gustave Le Grey”) and Sarah Kirkland Snider (“The Currents”). All three ladies are very a lot in demand and really a lot performed. However they couldn’t have a greater champion.

With a cool willpower, a tone filled with glowing coloration and a seemingly easy method, Martinez received Mazzoli’s miniature to glow darkly. A Chopin mazurka floated on air out of shimmering chords in Shaw’s rating, whereas Snider’s quiet tolling of bells was so majestic that it virtually appeared like digital music. Melody in all three of those items must be assembled a observe at a time. Martinez did so by offering such substance to every particular person observe that she gave the look of capturing it from the air, like a flying insect, and attaching it the piano in order that it might be part of the subsequent one.

The stunner was “Veil” by Viet Cuong, a Vietnamese American composer from L.A. who’s receiving appreciable consideration of late (the Pacific Symphony simply opened its new season together with his percussion concerto, “Re(new)al”). “Veil” is about only one observe, a G sharp that tolls all through and retains altering primarily based on how it’s hit, how the strings are damped (Martinez performed contained in the piano and out) and the harmonic context it’s put in.

“Veil” wasn’t written for Martinez, however it sounded prefer it should have been, on some degree. Her contact is magical. She lifts the veil and divulges, in G sharp, a world in sound, pure to the purpose of getting no nationalities and all nationalities. It opened the ears to all.

An impressive efficiency of Villa-Lobos’ seductive “Bachianas Brasileiras” adopted. This twentieth century Brazilian channeling of Bach flowed naturally from Cuong’s G sharps, leaving that impression that, whereas the surroundings differs, the Amazon, Rhine and Mekong Delta are all rivers, and water all over the place is nourishing.