Music Reviews : Cello Rarities From Mexico’s Carlos Prieto at Whittier

The “Mexico: A Work of Art” celebration touched down within the bright, music hall-like ambience of Whittier College’s Shannon Center Monday night. There, Mexican cellist Carlos Prieto offered another diverse helping of rare, often worthy music that hopefully won’t be consigned back to the closet after this campaign is over.

A solid, dependably objective cellist, Prieto grew more viscerally involved with the material in the second half but displayed occasional pitch problems in the upper regions. His program opened in a flash of dissonance with Carlos Chavez’s acerbic Sonatina, whose second movement drove obsessively over drone-like piano figurations.

But then, the cellist looked further back to Manuel Ponce’s Three Preludes--the first two of which wore their lyrical hearts proudly on their sleeves, and the third fluttered about in a moto perpetuo , in which Prieto skillfully handled the rapid bowings. Except for an occasional outbreak of distinctly non-European dance rhythms (could that have been a touch of rag in the Finale?), Ponce’s heroic Cello Sonata almost could have been written by Brahms.

A change in the program brought forth Manuel Enriquez’s rather gruff Sonatina for solo cello to open the second half. Enriquez then served as a transcriber for the virile local flavor of Miguel Bernal Jimenez’s “Three Tarascan Dances,” as pianist Edison Quintana conjured orchestral-like colors from his Steinway. Two of Silvestre Revueltas’ Three Pieces (also transcribed by Enriquez) were typically flamboyant, the third being a wild, barbaric, even humorous dance.

As the program unexpectedly ditched Mexico for Argentina, Astor Piazzolla’s “Le Grand Tango” began playfully but soon rambled uncontrollably like a verbose talker who doesn’t know when to quit. And in the encore, Prieto left the Western Hemisphere altogether for an elegant rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise (in a Leonard Rose transcription).