By
VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
“When we think
of Argentine composers we think of Piazzolla and now Osvaldo Golijov,” said
Michael Barrett, the general director of the Caramoor International Music
Festival. “But that’s the tip of one iceberg in one country.” Mr. Barrett and
the festival are probing deeper into Latin American music with Sonidos Latinos,
a two-year series of concerts that opens tonight.
A number of
important Latin American composers and musicians, including Mr. Golijov, now
live in the United States. But Latin American classical music often gets short
shrift, Mr. Barrett said, adding that people have misconceptions about it,
thinking of it as “something you hear coming out of cars transformed into
gigantic moving boomboxes.”
Some composers
in the United States have incorporated Latin elements into their music, notably
Leonard Bernstein in “West Side Story”
and Aaron Copland in works including
“Three Latin American Sketches” and “El Salón México.” But Mr. Barrett said he
was “happy that we can go past that.”
“This is not
our music necessarily,” he added, “but you could say the same thing about Mozart, as most of us aren’t from Austria. It is great music and not some kind
of stepchild or poor cousin to our great classic works.”
Music in Latin
America is a vibrant mix of elements from indigenous Indian, European and
African cultures. “When those three things get cooking together over several
hundred years,” Mr. Barrett said, “what comes out is just starting to ferment
into tastier and tastier dishes.”
Even those
multicultural dishes can include unexpected ingredients. Mr. Barrett was
surprised to hear Chinese sounds in “Conversations With Cachao,” a concerto for
double bass, clarinet, alto saxophone and orchestra by Paquito D’Rivera, the
brilliantly versatile Cuban-born, classically trained, jazz-oriented
clarinetist and saxophonist. The work was commissioned by the Caramoor
festival, at which Mr. D’Rivera is composer in residence this year and next.
Those Chinese
sounds were inspired by Havana’s Chinatown, where the bass player Israel López (known
as Cachao) and colleagues used to eat Chinese soup and noodles after
performances. Mr. D’Rivera said writing a work dedicated to Mr. López was an
“old dream.” The concerto, scored for a traditional orchestra with a large
percussion section in the middle instead of at the back, reflects the eclectic
career of Mr. López, who has played in symphony orchestras as well as
nightclubs.
Mr. D’Rivera
originally intended to write a concerto for bass. But Caramoor wanted him to
perform in it too, so he wrote a double concerto in which he will play clarinet
and alto saxophone. It will be given its premiere tomorrow evening with Mr.
Barrett leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the bassist John Feeney.
Sonidos Latinos
opens tonight with a program including the premiere of “The Venezuelan Suite,”
a chamber work by the flutist and composer Marco Granados (who will also
perform), inspired by traditional rhythms. The third movement is a waltz called
“Beautiful,” which Mr. Granados described as a melancholy reflection on the
“psychological reality for Venezuelan women.” They are, he said, overly
concerned with their looks and “want to appear like they’re helpless.” The
waltz, he added, was inspired by “the sadness of that lack of self-esteem.”
The last
movement is a very fast Venezuelan merengue in 5/8 time. It is a challenge for
most bass players, who are accustomed to accents on the first or third beat, to
adjust to accents on the second and fifth beats, Mr. Granados said.
He and Mr.
D’Rivera are to perform together on July 13 in a program that includes chamber
works by Mr. D’Rivera, Mr. Golijov, Alberto Ginastera and others. There are
family events during the day on June 30, including performances by Mr. Granados
and others on a variety of Latin American instruments, with Jamie Bernstein as
a musical guide. Sonidos Latinos concludes with an extended jazz concert on
July 28, featuring performances by the David Sanchez Quartet, the Geri Allen
Trio, the Steve Turre Quintet, the Eddie Palmieri Afro-Caribbean Jazz Septet
and others.
Mr. D’Rivera
will also perform in a second jazz concert, on Aug. 4. “We should be exposed to
lots of music, which enriches your health and style, and you become a better
musician,” he said. “Jazz people are missing thousands of years of tradition,
and classical people miss the spontaneity of jazz.”
“When you do
Latin jazz,” he added, “you have to know both styles very well, or it is too
jazz to be Latin or too Latin to be jazz. If you are going to cook
Cuban-Chinese food, you can do it, but you have to know both worlds well.”
Mr. Barrett
suggests that the music of Latin American composers like Mr. D’Rivera and Mr.
Granados (who both live in the United States) is exciting precisely because
they do know many worlds well. Fluent in various musical dialects, he said,
they incorporate, within the classical idiom, elements from the melting pot of
Latin cultures before “layering it in with their own North American
experiences.”