Two Classic Political Film Scores
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
Redes (1935) [34:17]
Aaron COPLAND (1900-1990)
The City (1939) [34:07]
PostClassical Ensemble/Angel Gil-Ordóñez
rec. 15 October 2007 (Copland), 11 May 2014 (Revueltas), Dekelboum Concert Hall, Clarence Smith Performing Arts Center, College Park, Maryland, USA
NAXOS 8.574350 [68:27]
Personally and aesthetically there was little common ground between Silvestre Revueltas and Aaron Copland, whose differences were at least as wide as the Rio Grande that divides their nations. The Mexican was intuitive, earthy, and intemperate, the last trait contributing directly to his tragically short life and even shorter creative career. The American, on the other hand, was calculating, urbane, and restrained, enjoying a long tenure as the unofficial dean of American academic music right up until almost the threshold of the 21st century. Where they coincided was in their sympathy for the political left, each taking up pen and score paper to agitate for what they believed to be a better tomorrow, and in their shared appreciation of the emerging importance of cinema in helping to convey their message to a mass audience.
This Naxos CD of film scores by Revueltas and Copland documents not only their political and artistic idealism, but also intimates how each of them saw it (and, to an extent, themselves) shattered. Revueltas went so far as to volunteer briefly on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, an experience which left him profoundly embittered and led to his mental breakdown in 1939 (and possibly his untimely death at age 40 the following year). Copland became a target of postwar anti-communist paranoia that eventually cowed him into renouncing his former political beliefs, thereafter expressing them only with the utmost discretion. Whatever shadows that loomed later in their lives would have been banished by these brilliant scores, both composed at the height of their respective composer’s creative powers.
Of the two, the more recognizable may be Revueltas’ Redes. Its genesis was as complicated as its afterlife in the concert hall. Like the composer’s other well-known film score, La noche de los Mayas, his original has been eclipsed by a concert suite fashioned by other hands. Gratefully, its arranger—none other than Erich Kleiber—restrained himself from the editorial interventions that José Yves Limantour would later indulge in his “symphonic suite” of the latter score; a gross distortion of Revueltas as radical (and inadvertently injurious) as that which Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov perpetrated against Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov or Ferdinand Löwe against Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Revueltas compiled his own concert suite which, despite having conducted it in Spain and Mexico, remained largely unknown until it was first recorded in 2004. In the 1990s, Enrique Arturo Diemecke, with the cooperation of the Revueltas estate, assembled and recorded a suite that salvaged a significant portion of the original score that had hitherto been unheard outside of the film it was composed for. This present recording, performed by the PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez, however, is the first ever of the entire film score. It is as welcome a revelation as can be hoped, permitting the listener to finally grasp the unfettered breadth of Revueltas’ genius.
Like Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Bernard Herrmann, Revueltas crafted evocative music that not only blended with and augmented on-screen action, but managed to create its own self-sustaining logic and structure which allows it to exist independently from the moving image. From the arresting opening fanfare, subsiding into hushed tremolo strings that evoke the fishing nets the film is named after, through the lyrical funeral dirge, the joyous son huasteco-like dancing, to the resplendent yet strangely ambiguous apotheosis, Revueltas’ score is a dazzling symphonic fresco that displays his imagination in full flight.
The PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Gil-Ordóñez surge confidently through this multifaceted score, packing heft and plenty of character into their performance. By dint of their charisma and exactitude of execution, they exalt the original Redes score as the vital masterwork it unquestionably is.
On a somewhat lesser plane is Copland’s score for The City, a featurette documentary commissioned for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. Collectors may be familiar with the suite extracted from the score, last recorded on a Telarc CD entitled Celluloid Copland. While not approaching the sheer energy and magnetism of Redes, a number of its cues exert a curious appeal for their augury of the musical minimalism that would dominate American academic music by century’s end. Take a listen to the “Steeltown I” track starting at 4:38, for example—a stretch of music that could have emerged right out of the score Philip Glass composed nearly 50 years later for the Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line. Most of the score, however, is in the Boulangerist, streamlined Americana vein that characterizes the work of Copland’s populist years. If not intrinsically fascinating, the score is of biographical interest for how it helped the composer along in his brief, but distinguished career in Hollywood.
Joseph Horowitz is the author of this disc’s excellent liner notes.
Having a recording of Copland’s The City is a pleasant bonus, but the real reason to buy this disc is for the revelatory performance of Revueltas’ Redes. Crossing my fingers that the PostClassical Ensemble and Naxos can be persuaded to finally record the original score of La noche de los Mayas!
Néstor Castiglione
