Music Reviews : Mexican Composers Perform Own Works

Manuel Enriquez and Federico Ibarra are two of the many interesting composers turned up by the “Mexico: A Work of Art” festival events. They are also quite competent instrumentalists, as they demonstrated in a tight, ear-challenging concert of their own works, Tuesday in the Recital Hall at CSU Northridge.

The program featured the world premiere of Ibarra’s “Sonata Breve” for solo violin, not that any of the other pieces are overexposed here. Ibarra, 45, may be best known locally for his one-act opera “Historia de un Pequeno Principe y su Flor.” His style seems to concentrate on expanding, contracting and redefining lyrical motives, in a serious postmodern context.

In that regard, the “Sonata Breve” would be characteristic. Clearly shaped and integrated, it develops a simple modal idea in highly contrasting patterns and textures, played by Enriquez with light, hoarse sound and less than maximum control.

Ibarra proved to be a pianist of considerable flair in his Sonata IV. The sectional piece begins with ruminative yet quite sensuous gestures, and climaxes in the chromatic apotheosis of the appoggiatura.

Pianist and violinist came together for Ibarra’s “Five Pnakotic Manuscripts” and “Diptico II” by Enriquez. The former is a tense, dramatic and formally rounded set of miniatures, marked by much sophisticated manipulation of the piano interior and chittering commentary from the violin.

Internationally trained at Guadalajara, Juilliard, Columbia and Darmstadt, the 65-year-old Enriquez seems to be an unreconstructed modernist. Which is not to say that his fiercely abstract music is the fruit of a juiceless and joyless intellectualism, as he showed with the pungent “Diptico II.” Acerbic, yes, but also appealingly coloristic in its restless timbral explorations.

Upwardly swooping glissandos in harmonics and much ponticello shivering show up in a more fragmentary setting in Enriquez’s “Movil II,” which he played with great deliberation. Ibarra presented Enriquez’s piano solo, “Para Alicia,” with focused intensity, unifying the extended techniques in a coherent mini-drama.