Luis Humberto SALGADO (1903–1977)
Symphony No 1 “Andean” (1949/1972) [30:26]
Symphony No 2 “Synthesis” (1953) [13:57]
Symphony No 3 “In Rococo Style” (1956) [29:02]
Symphony No 4 “Ecuadorian” (1957) [32:57]
Symphony No 5 “Neoromantic” — orchestrated from the piano score by Michael Meissner (1958) [26:55]
Symphony No 6 (1968) [22:39]
Symphony No 7 “A Tribute to the Bicentennial of Beethoven’s Birth” (1970) [25:01]
Symphony No 8 (1972) [24:07]
Symphony No 9 (1975) [12:49]
Cuenca Symphony Orchestra/Michael Meissner
rec. September 2019; Teatro Pumapungo, Cuenca, Ecuador
BRILLIANT CLASSICS 96256 [3 CDs: 218:58]
It sounds like something out of Borges, Quiroga, or maybe a subplot from Fitzcarraldo: a visionary composer, living in the tropics, isolated from the cultural mainstream, composing one complex masterpiece after another, most of them fated never to be heard by their creator. Had Luis Humberto Salgado been born in North America or in one of the Southern Cone countries, his art would have stood a better chance of international recognition. In the Ecuador of his time, however, where the musical infrastructure was markedly underdeveloped in comparison to other countries in the Western Hemisphere, wider fame eluded him. His biography would be remarkable enough on its own, but that he also composed highly original music of excellent quality is, as they say, something else.
Salgado was born on 10 December 1903, in Cayambe, a small town located at the foot of an eponymous volcano in northern Ecuador. He was the eldest of eight children in a musical family. His father, Francisco Salgado Ayala, was himself a composer and pedagogue of repute. Showing musical promise from an early age, Luis Humberto Salgado was enrolled at the National Conservatory of Music in Quito, where he earned his diploma in 1928 by playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 at his graduation recital. Within a few years, Salgado himself became a member of that institution’s faculty. In 1936, he petitioned the Ecuadorian government for a scholarship that would permit him to study in Europe, but was rejected; he never ventured beyond the borders of his homeland as a result. Despite his remoteness, Salgado was able to
remain up-to-date on global musical trends abroad thanks to his younger brother Gustavo, a cellist (the first South American to enroll at the Moscow Conservatory) and diplomat, who kept him well supplied with scores and scholarly works from Europe. By the 1940s, Salgado had become a one-man musical institution in Ecuador. Aside from his work as a composer, organizer, performer, and pedagogue, he was also a respected music critic and theorist. He wrote a number of monographs on Ecuadorian folk music and the composers of his time; including Stravinsky, Josef Matthias Hauer, the Second Viennese School, and Boulez. Undaunted by his international obscurity, Salgado kept right on composing, eventually amassing a catalog of approximately 200 works. He died on 12 December 1977, moments before he was to begin a lecture for his harmony class.
As Michael Meissner, the conductor of these recordings, said to me in conversation, Ecuador’s means of preserving its cultural heritage has yet to reach the sophistication commonplace in North America, Europe, and East Asia. As a consequence, quite a few of Salgado’s manuscripts are now damaged, incomplete, or have vanished. Part of the finale of the Symphony No 1 has been lost, necessitating its reconstruction from the corresponding movement of his later unnumbered Symphony on Vernacular Themes (not included in this set), which was a revision of his symphonic debut. The orchestral score of his Symphony No 5
“Neoromantic” is lost, with only a piano reduction currently extant, from which Meissner based his performing version.
Salgado composed in a variety of genres: music for voice, piano, chamber ensembles; four operas (including a trilogy based on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire), a ballet, several concerti, and the nine symphonies included on this Brilliant set. Like Brahms and Vaughan Williams, Salgado was a symphonic late-bloomer; his Symphony No 1
“Andean” was composed at the age of 46. He quickly made up for lost time, composing the entirety of his symphonic cycle within the span of a quarter-century. Like his other early works, Symphony No 1 was “Streamline Moderne” neoclassical nationalism typical of academic music in the Americas during the mid-20th century; a style popularized by the likes of Copland, Ginastera, Moncayo, and the young Carter, among many others. It begins with a five-note motif, announced by solo tubular bells, which is threaded through and developed in the rest of the symphony. True to its subtitle, the work is packed with Andean folk rhythms. Each movement is a stylized representation of different Ecuadorian dances, concluding with a muscular alza alternating between 3/4 and 6/8 time. This was followed four years later by Symphony No 2
“Synthesis”, a compact, single-movement essay in absolute music which begins to establish Salgado’s mature style, as well as some of his peculiarities: terse thematic motifs, rigorous development, economic gestures, and a penchant for embroidering digressive solo instrumental cadenzas—especially for keyboard instruments and harps—into his orchestral textures. Symphony No 3
“In Rococo Style” from 1956 is an abrupt change of pace. Rather than being the Stravinskian neoclassicism implied by its subtitle, the symphony is a genial nostalgia trip somewhere in between Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana and Raymond Scott’s “In an 18th Century Drawing Room.” Especially attractive is its scherzo, a serio-comic-sentimental gavotte with a quirky and brief string fugato trio, interrupted at intervals by the mocking replies of what sounds like the local village band. Symphony No 4
“Ecuadorean” returns to Salgado’s earlier nationalist style, only now handled with greater subtlety. With Symphony No 5
“Neoromantic”, Salgado’s idiom turns increasingly chromatic, sometimes bordering on the atonal. The whereabouts of the original orchestral score are unknown. Meissner had to produce his own orchestration based on the surviving piano score, delivering a convincing facsimile of Salgado’s orchestral idiom. The Symphony No 6, scored for strings and timpani, signals the arrival of Salgado’s austere late period which often utilizes twelve-tone rows similarly to late Shostakovich. Symphony No 7, dedicated to the bicentennial of Beethoven’s birth, is a strange tribute. Its first three movements oscillate between acerbic irony and outright dread. Then, for a moment at the start of the finale, an unexpected burst of tropical sunlight appears, only for it to be rapidly dispelled by increasingly anguished music which takes on the mood of a Latin Totentanz before culminating in an ambiguous coda. Likewise, Symphony No 8, ruminative and poker-faced, betrays little of the martial celebration that it was purportedly inspired by, namely the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Pichincha, the decisive event that secured Ecuador’s independence from Spain. His single-movement Symphony No 9 from 1975 is an architectural marvel and a masterly encapsulation of Salgado’s art at its peak. It twitches and writhes to its ambivalent stretto, an ironic grin that seems to emphasize rather than brighten the saturnine atmosphere that preceded it. Those hoping to indulge in Latin American picture-postcard musical folklorism will be disappointed; Salgado’s late music is as uncompromising as anything heard in the symphonies of Holmboe or even Pettersson.
As with any worthy music, Salgado’s reach is universal. Although there were no full-time professional ensembles capable of playing his music in Ecuador during his lifetime, his music demands the utmost from his players, requiring orchestras of world-class calibre to execute faithfully. The Cuenca Symphony Orchestra, it needs to be admitted, is hardly ideal. Their intonation is occasionally wayward, ensemble unsteady, shifts in tempi and dynamics are herky-jerky. They make up for these by sheer dint of their audible enthusiasm, and their collective sense of discovery and awe at this fount of music which inexplicably remains mostly unknown. Still, some listeners may have more difficulty in overcoming these faults than others. There are no alternative recordings of this repertoire (save for an obscure CD of a Russian chamber orchestra performing Symphony No 6). Meissner provides this release’s excellent liner notes.
Salgado’s symphonies withstand comparison with the 20th Century’s finest. They are also an eloquent refutation of the pervasive and small-minded notion across the political spectrum that classical music is exclusively the work of “dead white men.” Rather than cynically exploiting issues relating to race and diversity for the sake of gaining applause in the echo chamber of social media, one wishes that orchestras would do something about it by programming music by the countless worthy composers from Latin America, Asia, and Africa who remain ignored for no good reason other than they were from places not traditionally associated with Western classical music.
This treasurable and inexpensive set will reward the patient and curious listener. Deepest thanks are owed to conductor Michael Meissner, an indefatigable champion of Salgado’s cause, and to Brilliant Classics for this intriguing musical discovery.
Néstor Castiglione
