One of the highlights of our 2020–2021 season was supposed to be a three-concert festival devoted to “American music.” The repertoire was chosen to reflect a broad conception of the term. For while “American music” is often applied loosely to refer to music written by composers from the United States, there is, of course, a great deal of other music from North and South America, as well as significant interaction among the composers of the two continents. The first US composer to achieve world renown was Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who drew much of his inspiration from Latin America; Aaron Copland ...

One of the highlights of our 2020–2021 season was supposed to be a three-concert festival devoted to “American music.” The repertoire was chosen to reflect a broad conception of the term. For while “American music” is often applied loosely to refer to music written by composers from the United States, there is, of course, a great deal of other music from North and South America, as well as significant interaction among the composers of the two continents. The first US composer to achieve world renown was Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who drew much of his inspiration from Latin America; Aaron Copland and Carlos Chavez were close associates; Alberto Ginastera’s stunning opera Bomarzo, banned in Argentina, had its premiere in Washington; Copland’s El Sálon México was premiered in Mexico City. We designed our festival to explore those relationships.

Needless to say, that season was disrupted by Covid, and those concerts had to be replaced by smaller, virtual events. Still, our commitment to expanding the notion of American music has remained. Since then, we’ve taken up many of the composers and works we had hoped to present then; and this season, we’re offering a pair of concerts that echoes our Festival That Never Was. The first was our Masterworks 6, which featured two works by US composers (Copland and Adams)—along with Dvořák’s New World Symphony, which was composed in the United States and had an incalculable effect on our national classical-music style. This afternoon, we follow up with a concert offering three approachable 20th-century Latin American works, each strikingly different in character.

The program opens with Tres aires chilenos (Three Chilean Airs) composed in 1942 by Enrique Soro (1884-1954). Like so many composers from the Americas at the time, Soro was trained in Europe—although instead of ending up in Paris (as Chavez, Copland, and Astor Piazzolla did), he turned to Milan, where his father (also a composer) had studied. But he returned to his native Chile for most of his life, serving as an influential teacher and helping to establish the Chilean classical tradition. As tonight’s conductor Fernanda Lastra reminds us, his “Sinfonia Romantica” is generally claimed to be Chile’s first symphony.

This afternoon’s work is something of an outlier in his output—one of his rare works to be grounded in vernacular idioms. The main inspiration, says Fernanda, is the cueca, a musical genre found in Chile and the north of Argentina. Apparently, the melodic material is Soro’s own. But in rhythm, gesture, and form, this vital and enlivening work clearly reflects folk traditions. (In this regard, the work has something in common with some of Copland’s music, which evokes the essence of US folk music without quoting it.) If you remember Soro’s Andante Appassionato, which we performed in 2022 on another American-music Casual, you won’t be surprised by the attractiveness of this triptych—and may well find yourself humming it on your way home.

The 1941 Concierto del Sur (Concerto of the South) for guitar and orchestra by Mexican composer Manuel María Ponce (1882–1948) is just as inviting, although quite different in temperament—nearly, says Fernanda, “in a different language.” Ponce was a wide-ranging composer with a strong interest in the popular and folk music of his country, himself penning popular songs (including the once famous “Estrellita”), arrangements of folk music, folk-inflected “classical” works—as well as music that looked back to the history of European classics. (In fact, like violinist Fritz Kreisler, he wrote a number of classical “forgeries” that were published under the names of long-deceased Baroque composers.) He was a close friend of guitar virtuoso Andrés Segovia (this concerto was written for and premiered by him), and his contribution to the guitar repertoire is immense, even though, curiously, he did not play the instrument himself.

The Concierto del sur developed over a long period—from 1926 to 1941—in part because of anxiety that the guitar would be drowned out by the orchestra. In the end, though, Ponce’s transparent orchestration (four woodwinds, timpani, and strings) not only gave the soloist prominence, but also introduced an opportunity for delightful chamber-music-like conversations between the guitar and the woodwinds. Add to this its melodic charm, its canny references to the Baroque period, and its spectacular first-movement cadenza—and it’s no surprise that it has become one of the most beloved guitar concertos of the twentieth century.

The concert closes with Tangazo, composed in 1970 by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992). Over the past few years, Piazzolla has become the most popular Argentinian composer in the United States—the orchestra has already performed his Four Seasons of Buenos Aires and his Fuga y misterio. He spent his early years in New York, where he immersed himself in a variety of musical traditions, including classical, jazz, and traditional Argentine tango. He moved back to Argentina in 1936, where he struggled for years to settle on a style, performing on the bandonéon (a type of concertina popular in Latin America) in tango groups and studying classical music with Alberto Ginastera, among others. Eventually, he won a chance to study in Paris with legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger, who gave him the confidence to stop “following the rules” (as Fernanda puts it) of traditional “classical” music and to develop the tango idiom in which he best expressed himself. She elaborates: “He needed someone to validate his ‘intuition’ that he had something valuable to offer to the world as a composer.”

All those years of searching paid off, for even after he settled on the tango, he never rejected the other influences on his idiom. He was thus able to merge tango with classical
(especially Baroque) and jazz traditions, producing an idiom with a new complexity that eventually became known as the nuevo tango (new tango). If, as Fernanda suggests, Ponce’s concerto is classic in outlook, Piazzolla “is creating a new language,” one that “takes more risks” than Ponce’s does, one that “goes to the edge.” And if Soro’s Tres aires chilenos celebrates the innocent folk music of rural areas, Tangazo is essentially urban music—especially music of Buenos Aires—of great sophistication. Among other things, Fernanda points out, Piazzolla uses “tons of effects,” drawing unusual, often percussive, sounds from his strings—for instance, chicharra, a sound effect produced by playing with the bow placed behind the bridge; latigo, or whip, a very fast glissando; and tambor, which creates a drum-like effect. Piazzolla was obsessed with the sound of the traffic of Buenos Aires, she reminds us; and you’ll definitely hear that in this piece.

The orchestra’s 2020-2021 season is evoked in another way in this concert as well. Those of you who were audience members then may remember how rapid changes in health regulations led to rapid changes in programming. Hence the motto we used at the time: Expect the Unexpected. And there’s something wildly unexpected on this afternoon’s concert, too: the finale of the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra composed in 1918–19 by Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934). Obviously, it doesn’t fit, geographically or stylistically, with the rest of the program: but as we’ve often done in the past, we’ve made room to introduce the winner of the Civic Morning Musicals Youth Concerto Competition, who this year is Abigail (Abby) Feng—a student of cellist David Ying, well known as a member of the Ying Quartet.

The Elgar is not only unexpected in the context of this program—it’s also unexpected in the repertoire of such a young musician. First, it grew out of Elgar’s recognition of personal mortality: he had just gotten out of the hospital when he began it, and his beloved wife Alice was dying of lung cancer as he wrote it. Second, there was Elgar’s growing belief that, having briefly been the standard-bearer for modern English music, his renown would be fleeting—that in the wake of the radical works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others, his Edwardian idiom would be increasingly scorned as old-fashioned. (His fears turned out to be unfounded, and his reputation is now more solid than ever.) Most important, the First World War had destroyed the Europe—indeed, the world—that he knew. Whether it was a conscious intention or not, the Cello Concerto turned out to be his farewell to composing; although he wrote a few snippets afterwards, this was his last substantial work.

In other words, the concerto is a work of pain, loss, and nostalgia—surely a bit much for a seventeen-year-old cellist? Abby disagrees. She’s been caught up by this concerto since she was in sixth grade—and although she recognizes that her teacher at the time (Syracuse Orchestra cellist Walden Bass) was right that she didn’t have either the musicality or the technique to handle it then, she’s a different person now. In particular, she’s been influenced, in her interpretation, by several profound experiences: the death of her grandfather and, later on, the suicide of a friend. “I was studying the first movement of the Elgar, and I used the music to sort through my emotions, and really let it out.” As for the technical challenges: Interestingly, when she mentions them, there is something that touches on the sonic adventure of the Piazzolla. “There are a lot of different types of sound that I have to produce. Sometimes I need a really smooth bow, and very solid articulation, and then sometimes I have to do really short and jumpy stuff. Also, changing the way I shift and the way I do vibrato makes everything sort of stand out.” This performance is especially meaningful to her: “I'm really grateful and honored for this opportunity to play with the orchestra, and since I was young, I've watched them. They’re really inspiring.”

As they are to so many of us!

Peter J. Rabinowitz

Have any comments or questions? Please write to me at prabinowitz@SyracuseOrchestra.org