Los Angeles Philharmonic Celebrate Latin Culture with “Nuestros Sonidos”

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 24 October 2024 20:29

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Fadi Kheir

At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium—as part of its festival celebrating Latin culture in the United States, “Nuestros Sonidos”—on the night of Thursday, October 10th, I had the considerable fortune to attend a wonderful concert presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic—confidently conducted by the celebrated Gustavo Dudamel—along with the excellent Brooklyn Youth Chorus led by Artistic Director Dianne Berkun Menaker. 

The event began splendidly with an engaging account of Roberto Sierra’s brisk, colorful, and propulsive Alegría, which was commissioned by the Houston Symphony and premiered by it in 1996. About the composer, program annotator John Henken usefully records the following: 

Born in Puerto Rico in 1953, Roberto Sierra continued his education in England and Germany, and then worked with György Ligeti in Hamburg for three years. Sierra calls his fusion of European modernism and Latin American folk elements “tropicalization.”

Also pleasurable was a sterling rendition of Arturo Márquez’s rhythmic, dramatic Danzón No. 9 from 2017, which is dedicated to Dudamel and is even more populist in inspiration. Henken provides some valuable background on it:

Born in Mexico, Arturo Márquez spent his middle school and high school years in La Puente, California, where he began his musical training. After returning to Mexico, he studied at the National Conservatory of Music and the Institute of Fine Arts, followed by private study in Paris with Jacques Castérède and at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick, Stephen Mosko, Mel Powell, and James Newton.

At that time, Márquez was interested in avant-garde techniques and processes, although his time at CalArts inspired him to add jazz and world-music elements to the mix. These ideas begin to play out in his first Danzón, composed in 1992. Essentially an electronic piece for tape and optional saxophone, it also includes minimalist aspects and references to the traditional danzón, an old salon dance from Cuba that became popular in Veracruz and then in Mexico City, where it still holds sway. (The composer later arranged the piece for ensemble, but still featuring the alto saxophone.)

This initial elaboration on the danzón proved crucial for Márquez, renewing his own musical language in a turn away from modernist impulses. His Danzón No. 2, one of the most popular “classical” music works of the last quarter-century, confirmed this new direction. 

The first half of the evening closed superbly with an exciting realization of Gabriela Ortiz’s 2019 revision of her Antrópolis, written in 2018, which is another ebullient, dynamic work, also largely in a vernacular idiom. The composer provided the following note on it:

The word antro has its origin in the Latin antrum, meaning “grotto” or “cavern.” In Mexico, until the 1990s, the term referred to a bar or entertainment place of dubious reputation. But nowadays, and especially among younger people, this word refers to any bar or nightclub.

One time, while talking with flutist Alejandro Escuer, we imagined the title of a future work, one that would synthesize the music of Mexico’s legendary dance halls and bars: Antrópolis, a neologism, a precisely invented name for a piece that narrates the sound of the city through its dance halls and nightclubs. In 2017, conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto commissioned me to write a short work—brilliant and rather lightweight—to be premiered at Carnegie Hall at the conclusion of a concert by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra celebrating the 80th birthday of Philip Glass.

Given the parameters of the commission, I retrieved the title we had imagined, and thus Antrópolis came to life. It is a piece in which I wanted to pay a very personal tribute to some of those antros or emblematic dance halls of Mexico City that left a special sound imprint in my memory. These cabarets or dance halls— such as El Bombay, where it is said that Che Guevara would twirl, or the Salón Colonia, which seems to have come out of a dream sequence from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema—represent the nostalgia for rumberas and live dance orchestras. Who doesn’t remember the fun ballroom Los Infiernos, a perfect place for those who would leave their cubicles after a long day at work to go dancing, drink, and listen to music? Finally, the memory of the bar Tutti Frutti, where I first met the punk couple who own the antro and you could listen to experimental music from the 1980s, leaves an impression. Antrópolis is the sonic reflection of a city through its antros, including the accumulation of experiences that we bring and that form an essential part of our history in complex but fascinating Mexico City.

The second half of the evening was a marvel: it featured the extraordinary Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade who performed more than a dozen songs with the orchestra, including some with the chorus, plus another half-dozen with her band. Two of these latter were duets with Jon Baptiste, including the Beatles song “Blackbird” (written by Paul McCartney) and the famous Mexican song, “Cucurrucucú Paloma.”

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