
SILVESTRE REVUELTAS Redes: Suite (Arr. E. Kleiber)
PAQUITO D’ RIVERA Concierto venezolano para trompeta y orquesta (Obra ganadora del Grammy 2023)
INOCENTE CARREÑO Margariteña
PACHO FLORES Cantos y revueltas. Fantasía concertante para trompeta, cuatro venezolano y orquesta
Trumpet | Pacho Flores
Four-strings | Leo Rondón
Conductor | Manuel Hernández Silva
Program notes
From the solar ports of Veracruz and Isla Margarita to the plains of the Orinoco and its hauling songs, from the molasses dance of the Havana boardwalk to the Venezuelan joropo, all the warm air from overseas returns today to Arenal in Seville, where America has, at the very feet of this Teatro de la Maestranza, its door and its port.
Melodies of back and forth. The great river, the great king of Andalusia, immersed in the ocean’s depths, connects the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea with the shores of Seville and Triana. It is no coincidence that Paquito D'Rivera's "Venezuelan Trumpet Concerto" was awarded here with the Latin Grammy, that is, Baroque. Today, in the burned brass of Pacho Flores' trumpet and the four fiery strings of Leo Rondón, we will beat with the airs and sounds of a new world that is the closest to us. Today, the Torre del Oro dresses in gala, and the bells of Triana join the orchestra because above, the symphonic fleet of Tierrafirme rises. If the European “spring of nations” injected romanticism into music, the rhythms and themes of America inject the Dionysian vibration of the Tropics into symphonic music. A hurricane-like richness, Spanish, indigenous, and African, that vibrates in the work of composers like the Mexican Silvestre Revueltas, the Cuban Paquito D'Rivera, and the Venezuelans Inocente Carreño or Pacho Flores, expanding the orchestra’s timbres into wild and unknown territories.
The conductor is the Venezuelan maestro, Manuel Hernández-Silva, who has become deeply rooted in Spain. His work leading Andalusian ensembles like the Orquesta Joven de Andalucía, the Málaga Philharmonic, and the Córdoba Orchestra has left a masterful imprint on many musicians from our land. There is no better conductor to lead this "hot land" repertoire, which he has recorded with these same soloists, Pacho Flores and Leo Rondón, for Deutsche Grammophon and who are now bringing it to audiences around the world.
Redes
The Mexican Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) is one of the leading figures of 20th-century American music. Trained as a violinist and conductor, he initially stood out as a virtuoso of the instrument. It wasn’t until the 1930s that he began a rapid career as a composer, which was cut short by alcoholism, a condition brought on by his melancholic and introverted temperament, worsened after his visit to Spain in 1937 alongside Octavio Paz to support the Republic. In his travel notes, we read: “What am I in the face of this tragedy? I am ashamed to walk calmly down the street. I envy the humblest of the fighters. The thought of our work as artists, full of vanity and arrogance, overwhelms me”.
A committed author, he belonged to the group of Mexican artists who, like the muralists Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco, believed in the political action of art and its capacity to improve the conditions of the most disadvantaged, though, unlike them, he soon lost faith in power.
In Barcelona, he premiered “Redes,” the work we will hear today, which served as the soundtrack to the film of the same name, one of the classics of Mexican cinema that depicts the harsh working conditions and the struggle of fishermen from the city of Alvarado on the Veracruz state coast.
Beyond the social and propagandistic intent of the film, in the wake of Soviet cinema, Revueltas’ score stands out for blending Stravinsky’s classical vision with popular rhythms and colors, without succumbing to picturesque clichés.
<pIn the score, tightly aligned with the sequence of images, and adapted as a symphonic suite by the Austrian conductor Erich Kleiber, two parts can be identified: the first begins gloomily with the tragedy of a child’s death, and the second exposes the tumultuous struggle of the fishermen. In these "Redes" of the sun, we hear what Octavio Paz wrote about Revueltas: “It was like the flavor of the people, like the people themselves, when the people are people and not a crowd, like the murmur of a neighborhood and the grace of clothes drying in the sun. And it was also like the silence of the sky, which remains silent before our questions and veils its destiny”.
Venezuelan Trumpet Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra
The "Venezuelan Trumpet Concerto" was awarded the Latin Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Work in 2023 in Seville, when the ceremony was held for the first time outside of America, but still so close, because the Caribbean Sea not only stretches along the coasts of Miami but also begins right here in Seville, beside the deep (jonda) Triana district by the river.
"My Saxual Life," this is how the legendary Cuban saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera (1948) titled his entertaining memoir. A master of his instrument, exiled in the United States since 1980, as a composer, he has always aimed to bring the rhythms of jazz and the sounds of the Caribbean and his native Cuba to concert halls, both classical and academic. The "Venezuelan Trumpet Concerto" is a joint commission from the Mexican Orquesta de Minería, which premiered it in Mexico City in September 2019, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Valencia Orchestra, and the San Diego Symphony, sponsored by the Valencian instrument company STOMVI, and written specifically for the Venezuelan trumpet virtuoso Pacho Flores, who is expanding the contemporary repertoire of an instrument that, in his hands, is in constant evolution and revolution. In Paquito’s own words: "When Pacho asked me to compose this concerto, I immediately thought of something related to Venezuela, to the tragedy they are living, which is similar to the tragedy we Cubans have lived through for six decades, but with the same joy that Venezuelans and Cubans have for life."
After a solemn and grave orchestral introduction, the trumpet sings an elegy for Venezuela to which, slowly, like arabesques, folk motifs intertwine, and the movement marches forward, like life, between tragedy and joy, between the elevated and the popular, leading to a second part where the Caribbean fusion of Venezuelan and Cuban music takes place, like waters crashing against the same seafront. A sweet merengue rhythm that is both a danzón and bolero, where the Venezuelan "cuatro" and the "double bass" of the great Cuban orchestras can be heard, leads to an explosive finale in the air of the joropo ("the Venezuelan jota," Pacho Flores dixit) with the warmth of a tropical night, in another time, in another world, in Caracas or in Havana.
La margariteña
With the subtitle "symphonic gloss," "La Margariteña" is the most celebrated piece by Venezuelan composer Inocente Carreño (1919-2016). An emblematic figure of Venezuelan nationalist music, in this piece Carreño pays homage to the Caribbean Isla Margarita, the capital of which, Porlamar, was his birthplace. Premiered in 1954 during the first Latin American Music Festival in Caracas, it is an impressionistic suite based on popular songs from his island, following in the footsteps of Guridi’s "Diez melodías vascas" (1941). The theme of the song "Margarita es una lágrima," a geographical image of the island in the Caribbean Sea, structures the work, where other motifs resound, such as the "Canto de pilón" (the song for grinding corn to make cakes or arepas) and the "Canto de velorio," or the children's song to catch "tigüitigüitos," a small heron from the lagoons of Margarita, to which children, like Carreño, used to play by placing a ribbon on one leg to invoke good luck.
Cantos y Revueltas
Pacho Flores appears as both soloist and composer in these "Cantos y Revueltas" for trumpet and Venezuelan cuatro, performed today by master Leo Rondón (Guama, Venezuela, 1984). The "cuatro," as its name indicates, is a four-string guitar of Spanish heritage that forms the foundation of Venezuelan folk music. Premiered in La Coruña in 2018, the work brings together the work songs and melodies of the Llanos of Venezuela with the dizzying rhythm of the "revuelta" or dances in the rhythm of joropo. The work songs, a reminiscence of Hispanic agriculture, carry, over their bucolic nature, a melancholic and poetic depth, as in the "Tonada de luna llena," with which the piece begins—though "Luna llena" is the tender name of a cow called for milking—a song made popular by artists like Simón Díaz and Natalia Lafourcade. The joropo is a dance of departure in the form of a Spanish fandango that today returns, inflamed, to the port from which it came. The combination of Pacho’s burned brass and the lively pulse of the cuatro in Rondón’s hands creates an electrifying effect, a "tasty" spell, in the form of a fast-paced Orinoco with the scent of coffee and sugar cane.
José María Jurado García-Posada