Mexican Orchestra Gives Electric Show

It may seem strange to call an orchestra as lively, as enthusiastic, as energetic, and, most of all, as fresh as is the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Mexico a dying breed. These particular musicians, under their music director Enrique Arturo Diemecke, appeared in excellent musical health at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday night. They appeared, moreover, to be fired by a sense of mission that makes one believe that they plan to be around for quite a while.

I am sure they will be. But dying breed they nonetheless are.

Outside of Russia and Vienna, few major ensembles reflect their own culture. The player rosters and the style of playing is everywhere international--and so is the repertory. Recently orchestras have traveled to Southern California from New York, St. Louis and Pittsburgh with their music directors from Germany, Holland and Russia, and with the same symphonies by Beethoven, Berlioz and Mahler we regularly hear from our own orchestras every season. It wouldn’t have been much different if the orchestras had been from Oslo, London and Munich.

Mexico’s national orchestra is different. It was founded half a century ago not--as were most orchestras--by wealthy patrons or conductors, but by composers. Carlos Chavez and Silvestre Revueltas wanted it to promote Mexican music, and it has never stopped doing so. Indeed, I have never heard it play anything but Mexican music, either live or on recording, and would be eager to find out about its Beethoven, given the electricity of Saturday’s concert.

Chavez and Revueltas, both of whom are having 100th birthday celebrations this year, created a Mexican style of music that borrowed from French Modernism, but they also looked to their own folk roots. They learned from Stravinsky, who was able to build an international style of modern music out of his own Russian folk roots, and they remained in close communication with New York and Paris.

Chavez’s “Sinfonia India” set the movement’s tone in 1935. Though a short, single movement a dozen minutes long and in the standard symphonic sonata-allegro form, it sounds like no other music before, taking not only its themes and inspiration from Mexican Indian melodies but its whole style. It explodes on the listener, and so did the particularly vivid performance Saturday.

Revueltas was a more radical, more hot-tempered composer than Chavez (although both were hot-tempered enough to have begun another tradition in Mexican compositions--feuding). Diemecke ended the program with Revueltas’ last piece, “La Coronela (The Woman Colonel),” a ballet score he didn’t quite finish before heavy drinking finished him in 1939. A ballet about the Mexican Revolution, in its most memorable section, it lets the folk music of the people overthrow the decadent waltz music of high society.

The score, which often thunders like a Mexican “Rite of Spring,” is a mess. Revueltas having died just weeks before the premiere, it was completed and orchestrated by others. That version was lost and it was reconstructed yet again years later by more hands. It is hard to trust the final product, especially since color is as essential to Revueltas’ music as it was to the famous Mexican visual artists of the period, and at times the orchestration seems overly Stravinskyian. Still, the music is distinctive, and Diemecke’s savagely pounding performance did an effective job of beating one into submission.

Diemecke came with new music as well: a brief homage to Revueltas by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, Arturo Marquez. “Danza Silvestre,” given its first performance Saturday, is permeated by the sensual, moody, sexy dance that returns to Revueltas but also looks further south to the tangos of Astor Piazzolla. Diemecke began the program with Blas Galindo’s “Sones de Mariachi,” a romp of symphonic mariachi music, and he included, as an encore, Garcia Moncayo’s happily nationalistic “Huapango.”

All of this is music that one expects these players and their conductor (who is Mexican of German parents) to have in their bones. And certainly there was a collective sense of knowing how melodies breathe, of just how hard rhythms could be pushed, of where lyric melodies could pause. Diemecke is flashy but also exacting; he can finesse a phrase and he can also punch out a rhythm for all it’s worth. The orchestra, confidently virtuosic, is able to sound just as raw or cooked as the music demands.

But it can clearly do more. For a final encore, insisted upon by an energized crowd, Diemecke played a chaconne he had written in tribute to Chavez, an engaging romp around Handel with tambourines, that demonstrated that these winning musicians have a distinctive freshness that transcends styles.