One of the interesting things about my job is that I get a lot of music in the mail – artist managers proposing soloists for consideration, composers hoping to get their music included in one of our programs, and publishers hawking works from their rental libraries. Recently I received a collection of excerpted works by Latin American composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos, José Pablo Moncayo and Pedro Halffter that a publisher sent out. I haven’t listened to the entire CD yet, but seeing it reminded me of a work which we considered for our “Fiesta Latina” Pops and Young People’s Concerts back in January.

Silvestre Revueltas is one of the great overlooked composers of the 20th century. Born in Mexico in 1899, the year after Gershwin and the year before Aaron Copland, and like Gershwin his life was all too brief; he died in 1940. To my knowledge, the North Carolina Symphony has played just one of his works, Sensemayá, back in 2002. We considered programming a work of his for chamber orchestra entitled Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca, but ultimately chose other music instead. I’d love to play it some other time – it has incredibly vibrant colors given its small instrumentation, and rhythmically it is both complex and yet constantly propulsive. Not to take anything away from Revueltas’s originality, but to me it sounds a bit like Stravinsky or Prokofiev paid a visit to that famous cantina in Mexico City and captured their impressions, as Copland did in El Salon Mexico. The recording I have is by Esa-Pekka Salonen and a group of players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Check out the wicked tuba part in the first movement!

Switching gears completely, I’ve also been listening lately to Pink Martini’s fourth album Splendor in the Grass. (Renewing Pops series subscribers will know by now that we’ve invited the Portland, Oregon-based ensemble back for a return trip to Raleigh in March 2011.) In our marketing materials we bill the group as equal parts Parisian café orchestra, Brazilian samba band, and classical chamber music ensemble. The new disc also features their polyglot trademark style, incorporating all sorts of influences from virtually the whole musical world over. The title track includes the famous sweeping melody from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and the effervescent song “Tuca Tuca” includes a bluesy solo played on sitar – try that one at home, why don’t ya? The only track I’m disappointed in is “New Amsterdam”; its lyrics fall flat for me.

Many of our concertgoers were blown away by 21-year-old pianist Yuja Wang earlier this month. Her fiery approach to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was matched by her phenomenal technical gifts. On Saturday, February 6, she played three encores after the Rachmaninoff, each more impressive than the last. Listing them in reverse order, she closed with a whirlwind of an adaptation of Mozart’s “Turkish Rondo” movement from the Sonata in A Major, K.331, created by the Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos. Before that she did the single fastest rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee from the Tsar Sultan Suite that I’ve ever heard on any instrument; it was more like Flight of the Microbee. And before that she led off the encores with a wonderful sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, in G Major, No. 455 in the Kirkpatrick listings. We don’t hear much Scarlatti in the concert hall, sadly, mostly because he wrote almost exclusively for solo keyboard (over 550 sonatas alone) and opera, with a smattering of sacred music for chorus and orchestra. Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685, the same year as Bach and Handel – a pretty good year for composers, apparently. I have a Naxos CD of 19 of the keyboard sonatas played by the American pianist Michael Lewin, and got it out after Yuja’s performance. Lewin, incidentally, is a good friend of our Resident Conductor William Henry Curry, and performed music by Gottschalk and Gershwin at Bill’s inaugural concert as music director of the Durham Symphony. Ironically, I first met Michael more than 20 years ago when he did a semester-long artist residency at tiny Whitman College in rural southeastern Washington state, where I got my undergraduate degree. He even accompanied me in a recital performance of Fauré’s Elegy…small world.

Finally, many of our concertgoers probably heard their first live performance of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony at the same concert that Yuja Wang took by storm. I was particularly glad to hear it, because now I’ve completed a personal Sibelius cycle of sorts – I’ve heard all seven symphonies live. If you’re hoping to hear it again, and can’t wait until this summer when our WUNC-FM radio broadcast of the concert is likely to be, I’d recommend the version by the Lahti Symphony conducted by Osmo Vänskä, which was recorded by our good friends at BIS Records. Vänskä turned a regionally respected orchestra in Finland into a major recording player in the industry before taking the artistic reins at the Minnesota Orchestra, where he also works with our Associate Conductor Sarah Hicks who is their Principal Conductor of Pops and Presentations. Vänskä’s Sibelius is pristine, taut and utterly convincing.