At Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, Thursday’s concert, the first of a series organized by composer Gabriela Ortiz, traced four generations of Mexican musical lineage. Beginning with Carlos Cháves, founder of the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra, proceeding to his protégée, composer Mario Lavista, to Ortiz herself, and concluding with her student, Diana Syrse, this concert celebrated a musical heritage deeply steeped in culture and tradition.
Ortiz dedicated Tin-Tan-Fanfarria y Mambo for solo trumpet to comedic actor Germán Valdéz Tin-Tan. Jesdelson Vasquez began it with several fanfare figures before blossoming into a strident, rhythmic mambo. He navigated the complex, running lines extremely well, and his resonant, pure tone and crisp articulation radiated brightly through Seiji Ozawa Hall. ”
Carlos Chávez composed Cantos de Mexico for his Orquesta Mexicana. Its 18 musicians playing both European and Indigenous instruments formed to elevate the status of pre-Columbian music in Mexico. Pentatonic oboe and flute lines wound together over a steady rhythmic underpinning, with teponaxtle (slit drums) echoing their rhythmic figures. The texture built, adding a polytonal brass fanfare, before dissolving into a slower groove with a more recitative style of playing, handled adeptly by the ensemble. A “Vivo” section with a celebratory, unison melody rounded it out. The E-flat clarinet dominated the sound here, and Anju Aoto’s lively tone carried the momentum towards its climactic end. A true fusion of the Indigenous and European, this piece worked well as a proof-of-concept for this innovative style.
Composed entirely using natural string harmonics, Mario Lavista’s Reflejos de la Noche served as a striking stylistic departure after Cantos de Mexico. In contrast to the two previous extroverted pieces, this work has a distant, quiet, otherworldly quality that I greatly appreciated. The quartet handled the complexity of the natural harmonic technique very well and effectively captured the “reflections of the night” through evoking chittering crickets and rustling leaves. Composed in a minimalist style, it explores simple spectral harmonies that slowly shift from one textural and harmonic era to the next. This hushed, understated, yet emotive music blended beautifully with the sounds of a July night at Tanglewood.
Ortiz’s Puzzle-Tocas for Wind Quintet offered a short romp full of fun, chromatic harmonies, and striking contrapuntal lines. Her writing evokes Stravinsky’s works for small wind ensembles, such as his Septet and Octet, though Ortiz’s distinctive, heavily ornamented melodies add a freshness to this often-samey ensemble. Especially striking was her horn writing, combining idiomatic attacks and releases with a strong sense of melodic motion. Dena Levy handled this dense part beautifully, blending with the ensemble before suddenly leaping to the forefront for extroverted solo moments. She often paired with Peter Eklund’s bassoon, as they effectively played off each other, bringing out contrasting and unison moments to great effect.
Trés Haikus and Río Bravo, two of Ortiz’s vocal works, are scored for flute and mezzo soprano with a backing drone, and they tread similar compositional ground. Trés Haikus uses cello as its drone, while Río Bravo uses six singing glasses. Ortiz penned both in a loose, improvisatory style with richly ornamented flute lines interjecting and commenting on the mezzo’s recitation of the poems. While both sounded evocative and emotional, Ortiz handled this style more effectively in Río Bravo, mostly due to the texts used. The Trés Haikus are nebulous and undefined, using the sky as distant metaphors. The music reflects these qualities, creating an air of blurry mystery. Río Bravo, on the other hand, is a much more immediate poem that leant itself better to the art song genre. Dealing with immigration-related violence that disproportionately affects migrant woman, the text is sudden and visceral. The most striking moment, near the end of the piece, comes at the line “gritar rezar rasgar” (scream, pray, tear), which becomes a continually repeated mantra that underpins wild flute lines. The drone, played with singing glasses, adds an ethereal, metallic tone that emphasizes the serious musical environment, and Danielle Romano’s extremely expressive mezzo created much emotional weight.
The night ended on Diana Syrse’s Mi Canto (My Song). Written, composed, and performed by Syrse herself along with a backing orchestra, it calls for unity among different nationalities. It contains several stunning moments of orchestration, especially the opening, which uses swirling lines and evocative crescendos to create a sense of anticipation, before the music settles into a more pop-inspired chord progression. Syrse closed the concert with great passion.
This concert provides a cohesive view of Mexican musical lineage. Spanning four generations of composers and a broad range of styles, it evidences the depth and breadth of Mexican composition, as it effectively brought out Ortiz, her musical ancestors, and her musical descendants.