I am medically advised to be cautious about attending crowded public events, including Richmond Symphony concerts. The orchestra is making video streams of its Symphony Series performances available to ticket-holders. The stream of this program was posted on April 11.
Carlos Miguel Prieto conducting
April 6-7, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center
Carlos Miguel Prieto, guest conductor of the Richmond Symphony in the orchestra’s latest mainstage program, offered a tour d’horizon of musical Americana – all of the Americas, for a change.
Alongside George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Three Dance Episodes from ‘On the Town,’ ” the program featured four works by Latin American composers: Silvestre Revueltas, Alberto Ginastera, José Pablo Moncayo and Arturo Márquez. Altogether, it was a feast of vivid, brassy and percussive tone color.
Among the program’s discoveries, perhaps the most striking was a suite from the score that Revueltas wrote for the 1935 film “Redes” (“Nets”), a moody evocation of the lives of fishermen in Veracruz – “the happiest and saddest place in Mexico,” Prieto said in introducing the piece. That wide emotional spectrum comes through in a richly atmospheric, often complex orchestration – its scoring for winds is especially elaborate and characterful. Much of the music, however, is audibly crafted to accompany or enhance what’s seen onscreen, and sounds ambiguously moody without the visual element.
Ginastera’s “Four Dances from ‘Estancia,’ ” a ballet score produced in 1952, is one of the Argentine composer’s most popular works, a product of his “subjective nationalist” style, propelled by folk-inspired dances such as the graceful “Wheat Dance” and the malambo, the dance of the horse-riding gauchos, but couched in a more international modernist harmonic language and plentifully syncopated rhythms.
Moncayo’s “Huapango,” a 1941 composition inspired by his exploration of folk music in the Veracruz region, is one of the most familiar Mexican orchestral pieces, even to those who don’t recognize its name or composer; the same could be said of Márquez’s Cuban-inflected Danzón No. 2 (1994). Both are infectious and tonally colorful dance pieces.
Prieto, music director of the North Carolina Symphony and Mexico’s Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería, clearly steeped in the musical idioms of Latin America, obtained brightly expressive, largely good-humored performances of all four works, balancing energetic projection of their dance rhythms with exposure of their details of orchestration.
He took Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” at a somewhat measured tempo, giving its bluesy central section an unusually romantic tone. In Bernstein’s “On the Town” dances, drawn from the musical based on his score for the ballet “Fancy Free” (both introduced in 1944), the conductor and orchestra underlined the sly humor at the heart of the music.
The program was a workout for the symphony players, especially the brass and percussion sections – principal trumpeter Samuel Huss’ numerous solos were consistent standouts. Smiling faces proliferated from the conductor’s podium to the back stands of the orchestra. I’ve rarely seen the musicians so visibly enjoying their work.
The stream of this program remains accessible until June 30. Access: $30. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://richmondsymphony.com
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