Maximiano Valdes / Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela CARAMELOS LATINOS

This is a charming disc of popular Latin American music. The disc opens with a suite of dances by the Brazilian composer Mozart Camargo Guarnieri. They are characteristic dances bearing the titles Brazilian Dance, Savage Dance and Negro Dance, which sounds like it could have been written by Elmer Bernstein.

They were composed over a twenty-year period and were originally written for piano. The orchestral textures are rich and colorful. Guarnieri studied in Paris with Charles Koechlin and was a guest conductor at the Boston Symphony. Guarnieri composed Encantamento in 1941. The music comes close to his the evocative music teacher Koechlin. It begins with an atmospheric melody evocative of nature, but the music quickly builds into languid dance and then to the percussive rhythms of Brazilian folk music. The first hypnotic melody returns and the work ends quietly.
The short piece by Alberto Ginastera - Overture to the creole Faust - was based on the story by Estanislao del Campo and dates from 1943. The overture has begins with a sinister melody that quickly turns into a dance, somewhat reminiscent of Estancia. The music settles into a reflective melody, developing into a more dramatic melody to close the work. 

The short piece, The Wandering Tadpole of Silvestre Revueltas, is not well known. This is a dance from a larger ballet for children. The music has a nice sense of humor with various instruments darting back and forth with bits of melody, and there are echoes of a mariachi band.
Venezuelan composer Inocente Carreno's Margaritena receives a spirited performance. The music is centered on a folk song Margarita es una lagrima, which Carreno skillfully weaves into a rhapsody. Juan Bautista Plaza, also born in Venezuela, was considered one of the founders of Venezuelan national music. The fuga romantica for strings, from 1950, was written as homage to Bach. 

The selection closes with a work by Jose Pablo Mocayo - Hupango. Hupango is a corruption of fandango and is a dance performed on wooden planks. A brilliant score captures the essence of the dance.
This is a great selection of Latin American music nicely performed by the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra under Maximiano Valdes. Highly recommended. (Amazon.com)

Cuarteto Latinoamericano SILVESTRE REVUELTAS Música de Feria The String Quartets

Silvestre Revueltas, the "great free spirit of Mexican music," was born on the very eve of the 20th century, on December 31, 1899. His work as a composer came relatively late in his life, beginning when he took on the duties of associate conductor of the Mexico Symphony Orchestra (1931–34). Before that he played violin in a theater orchestra in San Antonio, Texas, and conducted an orchestra in Mobile, Alabama. He also studied in the United States (in Chicago, IL and Austin, TX), building on his early training in Durango and Mexico City. In the last years of his life, which ended early due to complications of alcoholism, he taught at the conservatory in Mexico City. The music of Revueltas is striking in its use of distinctive tone colors and complex rhythmic structures, often showing the influence of European composers such as Igor Stravinsky. More importantly, however, Revueltas strove to create a music that reflected the indigenous Mexican culture. To do this, he often used elements of the folk songs and dances of the mestizo culture (a blend of European and native traditions that we recognize in styles such as mariachi music). Revueltas also took elements of the so-called Aztec Renaissance, which tried to evoke pre-Columbian musical and cultural practice. All of this creates a musical style of great variety, one infused with Revueltas's distinctive wit. (Sony/BMG)

Gustavo Dudamel /Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela RITE Stravinsky - Revueltas

“There is inside me a very peculiar understanding of nature", the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas once wrote. “Everything is rhythm. That's what music is to me. My rhythms are booming, dynamic, tactile, visual. I think in images that move dynamically." There could hardly be a better description of Revueltas's La noche de los Mayas or of Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, the two works in Gustavo Dudamel's new recording with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.

“All these dances have a youthful energy", says Gustavo Dudamel. “Spring reflects a new beginning, something important to young people. I've known the Sacre since my first concert as a thirteen-year-old violinist in my hometown orchestra. Now it's also an important piece for the SBYOV. We first played it in 2009 in London, Madrid, Lisbon and, of course, several times in Venezuela. This orchestra simply have these rhythms in their blood - they even make one passage sound like heavy metal."
Powerful dance rhythms also dominate Revueltas's music for a 1939 film about the cultural clash between a tribe of Mayans and the modern world. Like Stravinsky's great ballet, the symphonic suite La noche de los Mayas is evocative, ritualistic music, and it ends with a wild sacrificial dance calling for elevenpercussionists. “It makes a perfect coupling for the Sacre", exclaims Gustavo Dudamel. And this explosive, mysteriously atmospheric coupling makes aperfect program for the most dynamic conductor and young musicians in the world today. (Deutsche Grammophon / 2010)

Kronos Quartet NUEVO

On Nuevo, a collection of music from Mexico spanning nearly 100 years, Kronos Quartet presents a kaleidoscopic view of a music as diverse as the culture of the country itself. On each track, the group’s sound is transformed, through the collaborative efforts of co-producers Gustavo Santaolalla, the noted Argentinean musician and Rock en Español producer, longtime Kronos producer Judith Sherman, and Kronos Artistic Director David Harrington, as well as through arrangements by composers Osvaldo Golijov, Stephen Prutsman, and Ricardo Gallardo, whose efforts serve to reflect the individual spirit and character of each song.

Harrington notes that walking through Mexico City inspired the record. “I became fascinated with this sense of the layering of things there—of time, of music, of culture, of art … And how you’d walk down the street and never know what you’re going to hear next.”

The sonic landscape of Nuevo suggests the vastness of Mexican culture, a diverse array of experiences and ideas—intellectual, spiritual, and cultural. From the boom-boxes on the street corners to the incessant blaring of television sets, from the traditions of Son huasteco and corrido singing to the influence of Cuba on the culture and music, the sounds of Mexico are the sounds of a place where elements of popular culture and traditional music share a lively coexistence.

The tracks from Nuevo are culled from seemingly disparate sources ranging from "Mini Skirt," by the late Juan Garcia Esquivel, whose early experimentation with stereo caused him to be dubbed the "King of Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music"; to Chavosuite, which features music from three wildly popular Mexican television programs, the original Chespirito and two spin-offs, El Chapulín Colorado and El Chavo del Ocho; to an explosive Prutsman arrangement of Silvestre Revueltas’s "Sensemaya"; to Golijov’s "K´in Sventa Ch´ul Me´tik Kwadulupe" (Festival for the Holy Mother Guadalupe), a composition based on David Lewiston’s 1970’s recording from the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Nuevo also highlights a variety of unusual instruments, like the musical leaf as played by Carlos Garcia on Alberto Domínguez’s "Perfidia" and the organillo performance featured on Belisario García de Jesús and José Elizondo’s "Cuatro Milpas."

The album also features rock en Español supergroup Café Tacuba’s "12/12," a five-part sonic portrait of contemporary Mexico, named for the celebration of the Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe observed throughout Mexico on December 12. The piece is an aural tapestry weaving together not only the sounds of electric and acoustic instruments, but also traditional Mexican music and street sounds. It fittingly reflects the spirit of Nuevo, in its merging of widely different sounds and textures to create a unified whole.

Closing the album is a remix of Severiano Briseño’s "Sinaloense" by the DJ Plankton Man, formerly of Tijuana’s Nortec Collective.

Gustavo Dudamel / Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela FIESTA

Recording a selection of Latin American pieces after a Beethoven and a Mahler disc is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Indeed, for Gustavo Dudamel the distance between Beethoven and the Venezuelan composer Carreño is only as great as a dance step. “My father played in a salsa group," he remembers, “so I started to dance when I was really small - a baby. You know, learning to dance is part of our culture - dancing is in our blood ... Latin music is all about dance, about rhythm. And we try to put this spice into all of our music. With Mahler - the second movement of the Fifth Symphony is so full of energy - or the last movement of Beethoven 7, or the first movement - there is a feeling of dance."

It was logical, then, that Dudamel's third recording for Deutsche Grammophon would be a disc of Latin American music. “Often in a concert we will play a Beethoven or Mahler symphony, but in the first half we might perform Castellano and Ginastera. To us, there is a close connection, because music is first of all energy and movement. Mahler and Beethoven are important, but it's also important to have the opportunity to present our own music. For this recording we decided to choose small pieces by different composers, to show the beauty of Latin American music. We created a little mosaic of the best. It's like a party, a fiesta."
Dudamel's selection includes four Venezuelan composers, two Mexicans and an Argentine. Leonard Bernstein's spirited Mambo, a nod to Latin exuberance from the North, which the Venezuelans have made their own, rounds off the collection. (Shirley Apthorp 3/2008)

Here is confirmation of a pulsating talent and, perhaps, a glimpse of the future. Dudamel's charisma beats through every bar of this scintillating survey of Latin American music. His Venezuelan players . . . play as if their hearts are fit to burst with pride as well as passion. And they sound magnificent, textures sharp and clean, driven on with rhythmic momentum. It's an enormous orchestra and at full-throttle the sound they make is awe-inspiring . . . I couldn't believe what I heard -- the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra's percussion section strike up the band with the swing, push and individuality of a dozen great jazz drummers and the brass section riff like they're plugged into the Venezuelan national grid. The visceral impetus with which Dudamel plants firecrackers under his orchestra outplays anybody else -- out-Lennying Lenny even -- who has approached the piece. It's that good, completely unheralded in fact . . . their rhythmic nous and heightened melodic expressivity override the longueurs . . . inevitably it's the infectious hardcore Latin spirit that, once sampled, stays embedded in your imagination.

Record Review / Philip Clark, Gramophone (London) / 01. August 2008

. . . it's a stirring collection of strong, moving works resounding to a tropical beat . . . the amazing, 27-year-old Dudamel, who catches the throb of this mighty, slashing music and passes it on to the equally extraordinary youngsters of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra . . . has honed his youthful charges to a responsiveness, a sheen in the string tone, an ebullience in the winds and brass, that elevate the Bolivar to a level far above any youth band in recent memory . . . Inherent in the new disc, therefore, are multiple levels of pride. Consider first the triumph of the young conductor and the orchestra he has developed out of the cream of Venezuela's youthful talent. Consider then their music: the rhythms and orchestral colors of composers nurtured on these homelands, carving a musical language from beloved surroundings. Consider finally the man in charge, diminutive, dimpled, a phenomenally talented bearer of the message of rebirth for this whole business of classical music.

Record Review / Alan Rich, Bloomberg.com / 01. August 2008