Saluting the World of Latin Music

“Latin Festival” was the minimalist title accorded the performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya Friday and Saturday at the Hollywood Bowl. A more accurate and descriptive appellation for the program, which also embraced performances by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, Cuban vocal diva Albita and jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, might have been “Spanish Music and the World.”

The reasons were apparent in the reach and diversity of the program, which began with the Philharmonic’s graceful rendering of Chabrier’s “Espana” and closed with Sandoval’s all-join-in, salsa-in-the-aisles romp through “Sandungo.” In between these disparate, but nonetheless related, musical bookends, the program briefly, but tellingly, touched upon the ways in which Spanish music has engaged and been transformed by its interaction with other cultures of the world.

The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet’s performance of Rodrigo’s “Concierto Andaluz for Four Guitars and Orchestra” (which received its world premiere at the Bowl in August 1968) occasionally resonated with thematic elements from his much better known “Concierto de Aranjuez.” But the second movement, with its floating harmonies and hypnotic rhythmic repetitions, was unique, with the four guitarists--John Dearman, Scott Tennant, Andrew York and William Kanengiser--offering alternating sweeps of melody subtly linked to the dramatic passions of flamenco.

Albita revealed Spanish influence in yet another area. Like Sandoval, she moved to the U.S. from Cuba in the early ‘90s, but she has never quite received the acknowledgment that her darkly sensual voice and charismatic style deserve. Her performance, characteristically, placed elements of the traditional Cuban son (which she has described as “the music that nurtures me”) in a lively contemporary setting--with notable effectiveness in the case of the classic son montuno “San Lazaro.”

After reaching from Spain to Cuba, the program added Africa and the U.S. to the mix in the virtuoso Afro-Cuban jazz performance of Sandoval. Although his usual rhythmic ebullience was diminished somewhat by the presence of Philharmonic backing for most of the pieces, Sandoval’s extraordinary capacity to find the creative heart of everything he touches was the perfect climax for a program devoted to musical linkages.