Rite - Stravinsky / Revueltas (2010)
1 CD | EAC rip | FLAC(image) + CUE + LOG | No Scans | RAR FILES (3% recovery) | 292 MB
Genre: Classical - Orchastral | Label: Deutsche Grammophon

Gustavo Dudamel's two full-frontal force orchestral pieces elicit high octane playing from his Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. Both Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps and Revueltas's La noche de los Mayas are revealed as models of revolutionary music making. In Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky transformed painter Nicholas Roerich's fleeting vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of Spring into a musical simulation of barbaric primality. La noche de los Mayas, originally scored for a 1939 film, is one of Mexico's musical treasures. This concert suite, edited by Jos Ives Limantour, dating to 1961, evokes a mystical lost world.

Review: This is the kind of CD that makes you rub your ears. These are kids from the lowest slums of Caracas, some of them as young as twelve. They have no right to sound this accomplished, and it's a wonder that professional musicians don't hide their heads in shame. I'm only half joking. However much is owed to the microphones, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orch. delivers a Rite of Spring that stands comparison with the best. Dudamel's reading is as energized and violently exultant as my old standard, Leonard Bernstein with the NY Phil. Except for the eerie opening solo from the bassoon and the hushed interlude before the maiden dances herself to death, every bar is hair-raising.

Up to now, I have been guilty of asking "what have you done for me lately?" in regards to Dudamel. We are past the wunderkind stage -- well, not quite -- and as the dust settles from the hype tornado, one wonders if brash exuberance will mature into something finer. Now that I've heard twenty or so concerts from him online, I know that Dudamel has both a charismatic and a callow side. Here, the two meld. This isn't a reflective or thoughtful Le sacre. It's Le sacre as performed by the Broadway cast of "Stomp!" Not that thoughtful is a completley desirable way to approach Stravinsky's barbaric masterpiece. Better to say that Dudamel has found his own style, departing from Boulez'a analystical disseciton, the composer's razor-sharp frigidity, and Maazel's virtuosity for its own sake. Dudamel feels the score viscerally, and you feel him.

Dudamel has made a crusade out of promoting the music of Mexico and South America. Here we get a different reworking of primitivism from Silvestre Revueltas, the visionary Mexican modernist who died just short of his forty-first birthday in 1940. Revueltas had heard Le sacre with open ears and offered a Latin descendant in his well known Sensamaya (Bernstein was a fan and made an early, riveting recording of it). Dudamel performs a suite taken from the 1939 film "La noche de los mayas," directed by Chano Urueta, a contemporary of the composer's who made films up to 1974. the style is crushingly primordial, and spookily reminiscent at times of Messiaen once the birds have flown south. Dudamel gives what sounds like a definitive performance -- or at the very least the best I'm likely to hear -- and since the youthful percussionists of the SBYO are incendiary, the listener won't miss the percussion cadenza added to the suite after the composer's death.

In all, this is a recording to make me believe, even more than I did, in Dudamel's potential and to celebrate the growth of an impoverished youth orchestra into a force for joy and light.

As an addendum, here are the notes for La noche de los mayas offered by the Kennedy Center online:


The suite assembled by Limantour stands as the largest in scale of all Revueltas's concert works, and the closest of them to a symphony. Its four-part structure also offers a sort of parallel to the similarly proportioned one Virgil Thomson produced from his own score for Pare Lorentz's 1937 documentary The River--a parallel in the sense that neither of these suites is a mere pastiche of fetching fragments, each being nothing less than a full-scale descriptive symphony, faithful both to symphonic structure and to the dramatic sense of the music's original function. The four movements of Revueltas's "posthumous symphony" may be summarized as follows:

I. NOCHE DE LOS MAYAS (Molto sostenuto) is an atmospheric piece, mysterious, brooding, suggesting perhaps mighty powers now dormant, images of volcanoes and pyramids. The middle section is brighter and lyrical, but the movement ends as it began.

II. NOCHE DE JARANAS (Scherzo, "Night of Revelry"). Jarana is not only a Spanish term for "revelry," but in Mexico the name of a particular dance form in which Spanish and native influences are blended. Experts in such matters suggest likenesses to the huapango, the jarabe and the son. This scherzo fairly bursts with activity and stunning colors, and is filled with surprising and frequently humorous turns. It is quite a workout for the orchestra, and for the large percussion section in particular.

III. NOCHE DE YUCATбN (Andante espressivo). The "slow movement" alludes to the Yucatбn peninsula as home to the Mayans in their magnificent second period. This nocturne is not so much mystical as straightforwardly voluptuous and impassioned. The strings carry the main burden, with imaginative support from clarinets, horns and tuba. Less voluptuous but more touchingly intimate is an interlude in which a solo flute, accompanied by an Indian drum and rattle, introduces the gently melancholy tune of a Mayan song still sung in parts of Yucatбn, the Xtoles, a paean to the day's end and twilight. When the strings resume the opening material they are muted, and this passage leads without pause to the final and most elaborate movement.

IV. NOCHE DE ENCANTAMIENTO (Theme and Variations, "Night of Enchantment") begins in an atomosphere of heightened tension and anticipation. After about a minute and a half comes the aforementioned cadenza devised by Enrique Diemecke, based on various works of Revueltas: material for guпro (a notched gourd, of Cuban origin) and native tambourine, recognizable as having come from the second movement of this suite; a drum figure from the Homenaje a Garcнa Lorca; a xylophone motif from Sensemayб. Once the variations get under way, the music becomes increasingly charged and frenzied. The listener is not likely to notice the transition from one variation to the next, but rather to be swept up in the almost frightening momentum and abandon of the music, as the brasses give out primordial chants and the percussion become more and more assertive, not merely punctuating the rhythm but driving the whole unstoppable and ever expanding force of the wild celebration--a grand sacrificial dance, perhaps, which, like the one at the end of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, does not so much come to an end as simply exhaust itself.

Tracklisting

(1882-1971) - Le Sacre du printemps

I. L'Adoration de la terre
01. Introductio
02. Les Augures printaniers (Danses des adolescentes)
03. Jeu du rapt
04. Rondes printanieres
05. Jeux des cites rivales
06. Cortege du sage
07. Adoration de la terre - Le Sage
08. Danse de la terre

II. Le Sacrifice

09. Introduction
10. Cercles mysterieux des adolescentes
11. Glorification de l'elue
12. Evocation des ancetres
13. Action rituelle des ancetres
14. Danse sacrale (L'Elue)

Silvestre Revueltas (1899 - 1940) - La noche de los mayas

15. I Noche de los mayas. Molto sostenuto
16. II Noche de jaranas. Allegro (Tempo di son)
17. III Noche de Yucatan. Andante espressivo - Tempo giusto
18. IV Noche de encantamiento. Final