The Firm and the Ephemeral: New Music From Mexico

by John de Clef Piñeiro

"Agua y Piedra - (Water and Stone: Recent Music from Mexico)": Lilia Vázquez Kuntze: Estudio #1 (2001) ~~ Georgina Derbez Roque: Cuatro Piezas en Seis Sonidos (1993) ~~ Ramón Montes de Oca Téllez: Dos Estampas (1993) ~~ Horacio Uribe Duarte: Preludio y Toccata (2001) ~~ Federico Ibarra Groth: Sonata No. 3 "Madre Juana" (1988) ~~ Marcela Rodríguez: Como El Agua en el Agua (1985) ~~ Arturo Márquez: Días de Mar y Rio (1997).   Ana Cervantes, piano.   PRODISC SDL00147 (72:46)

In this collection of solo piano works by seven present-day Mexican composers, new music champion Ana Cervantes presents us with a fascinating sampling of contemporary musical thought from the other side of the Rio Grande.   Taking our cue from the title of this new CD, which was made possible through the joint financial support of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts of México (Conaculta-Fonca) and the Institute of Culture of the State of Guanajuato, we might correctly surmise that the distinct characteristics of water and stone are in some way a clue to the contrasting musical offerings on this fine CD.   Indeed, these tastefully programmed works provide a quite satisfying alternation between the firm and the ephemeral in musical expression.

Beginning with Lilia Vázquez Kuntze's Estudio #1, one of the three works by women composers on this CD, Ms. Cervantes executes a series of challenging repeated rhythmic patterns as she progresses through a refreshing variety of chord changes.   A Webern-like angularity and spareness is reflected in Georgina Derbez Roque's Cuatro Piezas, a set of four short pieces.   The latter two pieces, especially, are at times imbued with a more ponderous and dark spacious quality that seems to require a deft sense of timing, amply possessed by Ms. Cervantes, to hold together the long attenuated notes and preserve their mood.  

In Ramón Montes de Oca Téllez's Dos Estampas (subtitled Two Scenes ), a Scriabinesque delicacy of line introduces and suffuses each of these two substantial essays of surpassing abstract beauty, the first entitled Vestiges of Shadows (in translation), and the second Toward the Mist .   In the Preludio y Toccata by Horacio Uribe Duarte, a rhythmic pattern of repeated notes, having a twilight-zone etherealness, introduces and pervades throughout the prelude.   About a third of the way into the recording of the extraordinarily and rhythmically challenging Toccata, the sound recordist or the piano, or a combination of both, managed to introduce into the track the thumping sound of the pedaling.   But the listener can overlook this, given Ms. Cervantes's most effective performance of the piece.   Whether or not one believes that any composer in any generation is entitled to redefine the shape and tenor of any earlier musical form to meet his own standards and imagination, this is what the listener should expect, beginning with the first Lento movement of Federico Ibarra Groth's Sonata No. 3 "Madre Juana," so named because the composer utilizes material from his opera by the same name.   Noticeably, but to good effect, the second Lento movement reflects the unmistakable coloristic influence of Debussy.   In the closing Allegro movement, there is an uncharacteristic frenetic and dramatic declamatory quality with a brusque stentorian ending that will certainly upend anyone's comfortable notion of what an allegro "should" sound like.

Mimicking in sound its very title, Marcela Rodríguez's Como El Agua en el Agua (Like Water in Water), very effectively conjures and engagingly sustains the image of raindrops falling on a still body of water.   In a fitting flowing finale to the CD's aquatic co-theme, Arturo Márquez's Días de Mar y Rio concludes with a stylistically impressionistic, romantic and rhapsodic work of effusive lyricism and traditionalist danza-like rhythms and themes.  

Admittedly, the composers on this CD are "new" to this reviewer, but given the quality of their work, they shouldn't be.   So, correcting this seems to be a laudable major objective of this recording project for Ms. Cervantes and her sponsors. And, on the whole, Ms. Cervantes has successfully presented a subtle and sensitively performed compilation of sensuous and abstract new works that are delightful, surprising and rich in their formal and rhythmic variety, and that impressively showcase her technical virtuosity and interpretative prowess.