SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Caminos del Inka,  A Musical Journey through the Inca Trail: Miguel Harth-Bedoya (conductor), Donna Shin (flute), David Requiro (cello), Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 22.10.2010 (BJ)

 

Following on from the familiar precedent of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project, the Peruvian conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s “Caminos del Inka” aims to do something similar for his own continent: “to discover, preserve, expand, and disseminate the musical legacy of the Americas through cultural and musical research, composition, publication, performance, education and outreach.”

In the process, the talented young maestro has unearthed a quantity of neglected works that deserve a hearing, and some half-dozen of them provided an encouragingly multi-aged Seattle audience with a very enjoyable evening’s voyage of discovery. Mixed cultures are always, in my view, more interesting than pure ones, and in this context it was worth observing that, among the composers represented, more than one displayed a creative combination of South American and European influences.

You can hear such disparate elements in the work of Gabriela Lena Frank—of Peruvian/Chinese descent on her mother’s side and Lithuanian/Jewish heritage on her father’s—as well as in the popular style of Osvaldo Golijov, who blends Argentinean with Eastern European Jewish musical wellsprings of inspiration. Lena Frank’s Illapa is a concerto-like tone poem for flute and orchestra designed to depict a moment in the life of “a powerful weather god from ancient South American Andean culture.” Finely played by Donna Shin and the Seattle Symphony, it culminated in a poetic exchange between the soloist and her flutist colleagues from the orchestra, who responded to her phrases from the offstage area.

Perhaps the strongest musical impression of the evening was made by Mariel, for cello and orchestra, arranged by Golijov three years ago from a cello-and-marimba version he wrote in 1999 to commemorate the accidental death of a friend. Cellist David Requiro played it with just the right touch of grave eloquence. Cherishing as I do a certain antipathy to what may be called “nervous music,” I particularly enjoyed the way the piece gives the music of both soloist and orchestra time to speak—to make its emotional impact without haste or aggression.

In the case of Alfonso Leng, though Chilean by training and domicile, his Preludio No. 1 sounded almost entirely European in idiom: it evokes a world not far removed from that of Webern’s Op. 1 Passacaglia, though Leng’s warm romanticism is more attractive to my ears than his much more famous Austrian counterpart’s rather astringent brand of expression. Diego Luzuriaga’s Responsorio similarly bracketed Andean folk sources with French and US training with influences from Japanese music. And then there was young Jimmy López, a talented 32-year-old from Peru whose Fiesta!, which he describes as “four pop dances for orchestra,” agreeably explores territory close to that opened up by Gruber, Schwertsik, and Zykan with their MOB-art & tone-ART group 40 years ago.

Thus far, you may have noticed, we were presented with a varied and substantial program without assistance from “big names” such as those of Ginastera and Villa-Lobos. The encore too—an exhilarating piece titled Brazil by Ary Barroso, brilliantly played in an orchestral arrangement by John Wasson—continued in that non-celebrity-focused line.

Aside from the musical aspects of the concert, which fully justified the excellent reports I had previously heard about Harth-Bedoya’s work, there was a visual element to the “journey” he had devised. I do perceive here (as Desdemona said) a divided duty. As a representative, and I might claim as an advocate, for persons of principally musical bent, I personally found some of the projected visuals distracting; yet presumably they are the kind of thing that might well help non-musical people to find their way into the enjoyment of the art—and there is nothing ignoble about the endeavor to attract and convince new audiences.

It was noteworthy, though, that the promised combination of “the sonic panorama with visual images of the people and landscapes along the Inca trail” was far from consistently in evidence. First of all there was the travelogue-style footage that accompanied Daniel Alomía Robles’s El cóndor pasa, and that for me detracted somewhat from the enjoyment of this beautiful and poetic little piece. Less distracting, because they were stills rather than kinetic patterns, were the folk-art images projected for a group of dances from a “Collection of Viceregal Music” by the 18th-century bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Martínez y Compañón. For Lena Frank’s piece, visuals were entirely absent, and not missed. And the abstract patterns that accompanied the second half of the program, though skillfully executed, added nothing so far as I could discern to the musical message, serving only to take the mind to irrelevant places.

I think, then, that Harth-Bedoya might be well advised to rethink the interplay between sound and sight in his Caminos del Inka programs. I should love, at some point in the future, to hear more of them—and to see less.

 

Bernard Jacobson