Santa Barbara Symphony Fires Up Revueltas Suite

A year ago, conductor Gisele Ben-Dor led the Santa Barbara Symphony in a performance of Silvestre Revueltas’ ballet “La Coronella,” in itself a daring move into the world of the fairly esoteric Mexican composer, championed by some and ignored by many. The following week the symphony recorded the work, for its world premiere recording as well as the orchestra’s own debut CD, and it was recently released to critical acclaim.

Saturday, as the symphony rightfully basked in the warm reception, it returned to the scene of Revueltas’ music--an alternately raucous and tender, folksy and radical scene. Revueltas’ “La Noche de los Mayas,” a suite adapted from one of his film scores, was the centerpiece of the program, even if it fails to rise to the coherent standard of the ballet. By turns rueful, sweet and rhythmically orgiastic--complemented by a back line of percussionists--the work leaves an impression of a somewhat distracted but spirited patchwork of ideas, over which Ben-Dor led the symphony with a crusader’s zeal.

Latin themes wove through the evening, including Copland’s “Danzon Cubano” and Manuel de Falla’s “The Three-Cornered Hat.” For good music-by-a-living-composer measure, we also heard Elegy for Orchestra (in memoriam Otto Luening) by UC Santa Barbara-based composer Joel Feigin. Feigin originally wrote the piece for the Santa Barbara Symphony Youth Orchestra, and it has a fetching, deceptive simplicity. Unlike some of Feigin’s more dissonant, post-serial music, this is an abidingly tonal, hope-tinged piece, which swerves in and out of some unexpected harmonic corners, but heeds a true emotional heart.

Every symphony program, in this fragile musical era, needs a warhorse to carry (and lure) an audience, and Saturday it came courtesy of Rodrigo’s handsome “Concierto de Aranjuez,” played with seemingly unerring grace by guitarist Sharon Isbin, supported with the orchestra’s generally high-level music-making. Continuing the Latin American theme, the masterful Isbin offered a waltz by Paraguayan composer Augustin Barrios as an encore.