South American Music = GOMES: Overture to Il Guarany; MONCAYO: Huapango; VILLA-LOBOS: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2; GINASTERA: Variaciones Concertantes Op. 23 – The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Enrique Arturo Diemecke – Membran Music multichannel SACD 222902-203, 69:11 [www.membran.net] **** [Distr. by Naxos]:
This is another in the series of over 150 SACDs which the German label Membran has been recording with the Royal Philharmonic since 1993. Many of them have been released as standard CDs on various labels – this one came out in 1999 on the Intersound label. I was originally thinking that two-channel masters had been used to create pseudo-surround channels as a couple labels have done, but the clean and strong quality of the surround signals on most of this series seems to indicate that multichannel recordings were originally made.
The RPO is Britain’s national orchestra among the many orchestras centered in the London region. It was founded in 1946 by Sir Thomas Beecham and has regular series at Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican, as well as a range of activities outside London. For this program the Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico was brought in for a fine program of four works by South American composers. We have two Brazilian composers, one Mexican and Ginastera from Argentina.
Gomes is best known for his operas influenced by Verdi; a stirring overture to one opens the program. The Huapango of Juan Pablo Moncayo is a quintessential Mexican orchestral work which will sound familiar to most listeners – one of the most interesting folk music-orchestral works ever written. The Second is one of the best known of Villa-Lobos’ many Bachianas Brasileiras, along with the No. 5 with the gorgeous aria for soprano. This four-movement suite has a striking “Memory of the Desert" third movement, followed by the familiar “Little Train of the Capira,” which is translated here as “Little Train of the Brazilian Countryman.” The creaking little train is probably one of the most famous musical depictions of a train, on a level with Honegger’s Pacific 231.
The Ginastera work has a main theme and seven variations, each using different instruments or groupings of instruments. The work opens with six notes on the harp which are the same as the six open strings of the guitar – this simple chord is the theme of the variations. The final variation involves the entire orchestra, taking various fragments and ideas from the preceding variations and making them part of the smashing orchestral conclusion. While the other three works might be bested by other recordings out there, this one is the gem of the four. I wasn’t able to locate my Mercury CD or LP of the work by Dorati, but as I recall I always had trouble really getting into the work with that one, and this recording put everything together in a satisfying way as far as I was concerned. It’s a sort of South American answer to Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
– John Sunier
