Cuban Program Gives Classical Works Their Due

Prior to a fascinating concert in Cal State Northridge’s Recital Hall on Saturday afternoon, billed as the first Los Angeles event devoted completely to chamber music by Cuban expatriate composers, a musicians’ panel made some highly provocative points.

It is perfectly true, as charged, that Cuban popular music has obscured Cuban classical music on the world scene. But it is not true, as implied, that Cuban popular music enters only through the pelvis, for it can engage the mind and heart as it moves the body; ask any conservatory-trained jazz musician who works with often complex Afro-Cuban rhythms. And clearly the most powerful Cuban signature in Saturday’s stylistically diverse classical program was that of rhythm.

Tania Leon’s “A la par” for piano and percussion--with passages of contemplation framed by dynamic toccatas of jagged, atonal, rhythmic grooves--was an enormously vital piece of work. While Odaline de la Martinez’s sublimely moving “Litanies” set out in a totally different direction--with spooky, recurring moaning from the harp, cello and bass flute--it also made use of rhythmic ostinatos in its own evocative way.

Elsewhere, the essence of Cuban-ness was harder to detect. The influence of Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s teacher Morton Feldman permeated the veiled, cool, spare textures and broadly paced suspension of time in Garcia’s “Music for Berlin.” Sergio Barroso’s “Cronica de Ultrasueno” for clarinet and tape drew listeners into a ghostly, microtonal world where the burbling electronics and the yearning, wailing clarinetist (Kay Nevin) generated a mutual tension that was relieved at the end by what seemed like an electronic gunshot.

Interestingly, the pieces for chamber ensemble that closed each half of the program--the late Julian Orbon’s vaguely anguished Partita No. 2 and the sometimes painfully shrill, post-serial ramblings of Aurelio de la Vega’s “Tropimapal”--were the least engaging and least individual of the lot.

Chilean conductor Juan Felipe Orrego ably presided over the larger ensembles, and special kudos go to Delores Stevens’ staggeringly wide variety of touches on piano and harpsichord and Eileen Holt’s work on piccolo and regular, alto and bass flutes.