Latinos & Russians view 20th-century strife in music.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
By PEGGY ANN BLISS
Special to The STAR
The Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra (PRSO) will pay homage Saturday night to Latin American rhythms and hardships and to the Russian take on revolution.
The program for the season’s 11th classical concert was curated by Venezuela’s Manuel Hernández Silva, who recently cancelled his guest conductor appearance. He will be replaced on the podium by Associate Music Director Rafael Enrique Irizarry, who has been pinch-hitting often this season as funding mishaps and other factors have caused wholesale changes in the orchestra’s lineup. No reason has been given for the sudden withdrawal of Hernández Silva, reputedly under consideration as successor to outgoing Musical Director Maximiano Valdés.
The Chilean conductor announced last August that he would leave this year after 18 years at the helm. However, with no successor in sight, Valdés has signed on to stay until one is found.
The soloist for the evening will be 28-year-old islander Arturo Castro Nogueras, an intellectual product of Puerto Rican and German conservatories and genetic product of two pianists: a Cuban father, Arturo Castro, and a Mexican mother, Magdalena Nogueras, whose mother was born in Puerto Rico.
She often collaborates with him in recitals.
The young guitarist, born in Mexico and raised in Puerto Rico -- he calls himself “100 percent boricua” -- is a distinguished classical guitarist, having been shaped by the late island virtuoso Leonardo Egurbida, among other world famed guitarists. The young soloist, known for his dedication to Latin American music, took his master’s in guitar and early music at the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Dusseldorf, Germany.
Castro Nogueras’ contribution to the evening will be “Three Concert Dances,” written by Cuban composer, guitarist and conductor Leo Brouwer in 1959, when he was only 20. At the time Brouwer was studying on a Cuban scholarship to Juilliard Music School, but after six months the funds dried up, and he transferred to University of Hartford in Connecticut.
Brouwer, whose grandfather emigrated to Cuba from Holland, was forced to return to Cuba just two years later as the Cuban Revolution cancelled his plans for further study abroad. He had already made a name for himself with this piece, even today seen as a hallmark of avant garde Cuban music.
“Mr. Castro is not an unknown quantity here,” Irizarry told the STAR shortly after his own successful pops concert of “unforgettable” melodies.
“He is a serious contender, heavily influenced by his parents, who are both formidable musicians,” he said of Castro Nogueras, who has played with orchestras in Germany and with the PRSO.
His solo recital career has taken him even further, to Paris, London, Vienna, Havana and Mexico City.
The young guitarist is preparing a new album of Puerto Rican music, to be released in 2027, and has worked on social projects such as the connection with neurobiology and music at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, where he specialized in interdisciplinary education, demonstrating with his guitar how music can foster intercultural education.
Dancing ahead of his time
Brouwer’s work seems a perfect fit for Castro Nogueras, as modern today as when it was first penned, combining Afro-Cuban rhythms with more classical European forms.
It opens with an energetic movement full of vitality followed by a more lyrical and atmospheric movement, closing with a rhythmic finale with technical interplay between the strings and the soloist.
The Mexican connection
The opening piece is “Redes” (Nets), originally a screen score by Mexican violinist, composer and conductor Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940).
Written in 1935 for “Redes,” a movie later called “The Wave” in English, it has the raw emotion of poor fishermen struggling with poverty and death in Veracruz, their tragedy exemplified by the funeral of a child.
The lengthy work was turned into a short orchestra suite soon after Revueltas’ death by Austrian conductor Erich Kleiber.
The Russians are coming
After intermission, the audience should be ready for Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s (1906-1975) take on the 1917 revolution, which he immortalized in his “12th Symphony in D Minor.”
The work, written in 1961, is a tribute to the revolution’s Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
It has often been criticized as bombastic and insincere, because Shostakovich had recently joined the Communist Party under pressure.
In fact, he was said to have scrapped a satiric, more honest version of the work just days before, due to fear of reprisals.
Some even called it intentionally bland and innocuous because of the composer’s lack of enthusiasm for the regime. The first movement portrays tensions in “Petrograd” on the eve of the war. The second, “Razliv,” evokes Lenin’s hideaway, where he strategized, while the third movement, “Aurora,” represents the cruiser whose blank shot signified the beginning of the revolution. The concluding, celebratory movement “The Dawn of Humanity” -- which signifies the end of the war -- is triumphant and energetic.
The jubilant finale, often criticized for its pomposity, represents the “victory” of the revolution.
This piece definitely depends on the (political) lens through which it is viewed.
The PRSO concert will be presented Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Pablo Casals Symphony Hall at Luis A. Ferré Performing Arts Center in Santurce.
Comments