GUACAMAYA
GUACAMAYA
SONGS & CHAMBER MUSIC FROM MEXICO
Mr McFall’s Chamber
Jamie MacDougall tenor 1, 3, 5, 10, 12, 19
Claudio Constantini piano
Stuart Semple percussion
Cyril Garac, Robert McFall violins
Brian Schiele viola
Su-a Lee cello/musical saw 19
Rick Standley double bass
1 María Grever (1885–1951) Cuando vuelva a tu lado [3:33]
2 Javier Álvarez (b. 1956) Metro Chabacano [6:30]
3 María Grever Júrame [2:58]
4 Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras (1927–2012) Canción en el puerto for cello and piano [4:48]
5 Agustín Lara (c.1897/1900–1970) Arráncame la vida [3:00]
Manuel Ponce (1882–1948) Cuatro danzas mexicanas (Four Mexican Dances) for piano
7
8
9
6
I. Vivo – Meno mosso, espressivo [1:22]
II. Vivo – Più lento [1:43]
III. Vivo – Meno mosso [1:50]
IV. Vivo – Poco meno [2:08]
10 Manuel Ponce Por ti mi corazón [3:20]
11 Arturo Márquez (b. 1950) Homenaje a Gismonti for string quintet [9:36]
12 Agustín Lara Granada [3:15]
Pablo Moncayo (1912–1958) Sonata for Viola and Piano
I. Allegro moderato [5:48]
II. Lento [6:49]
III. Allegro [4:28]
Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940) Tres piezas (Three Pieces) for violin and piano 16
I. Allegro [2:43] 17
Recorded on 27-29 April 2022 in the Parish
Church of St Cuthbert, Edinburgh
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Piano: Steinway, model D, serial no. 600443
Piano technician: Norman Motion
Design: Drew Padrutt
Booklet editor: Henry Howard
Cover photo: James Naphtali/Unsplash
Back cover: Pedro Coronel (1923–1985),
Untitled, 1980, oil on canvas. Private Collection.
Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images
Session photography: foxbrush.co.uk
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK
www.delphianrecords.com
@ delphianrecords @ delphian_records
@ delphianrecords
II. Lentamente [2:24] 18
III. Allegro – Allegro vivace [2:06]
19 Manuel Ponce Estrellita [6:24]
Total playing time [74:56]
13
14
15
The seed of this programme of Mexican music was sown in 2017. I remember leaning against my bicycle at the foot of the Mound in Edinburgh, taking a phone call from our sociable cellist, Su-a Lee, who always has her finger on the pulse. She said: ‘Jamie MacDougall would really love to sing some Mexican songs with us.’ Jamie’s wife, Susy is from Mexico and so he has a special affection for that country and a keen knowledge of its culture. Furthermore, he was aware of our involvement in Latin American music over the previous two decades, especially our performances of Argentine tango. He and I met and agreed on three figures as a focus for the project – Agustín Lara, Manuel Ponce and María Grever, three of the best-known Mexican songwriters of the early-to-mid twentieth century.
But the ground was already prepared back in 2004, when Mr McFall’s Chamber was in residence at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney. We were working with a freelance percussionist who happened to tell me that his favourite CD of the moment was La bella cubana by an all-female Cuban string orchestra called Camerata Romeu. During the following few months I tried unsuccessfully to track down a copy. My wife had spent a part of her childhood in Cuba and so it was that I found myself on holiday there the following year. In Havana we spotted a poster for a Christmas concert by Camerata Romeu in the Basilica of Saint Francis. We went to it, but I also sneaked
into part of their rehearsal, at the end of which I introduced myself to the orchestra’s founder and conductor, Zenaida Romeu. The following day I found myself a guest at her house where I finally had my opportunity to ask how I might get hold of a copy of La bella cubana – I had, after all, tracked the CD to its very source.
‘Oh no, I don’t think we’ve got any copies left now,’ Zenaida and her husband told me, vainly looking about. Instead, they gave me a copy of their more recent CD, Danza de las brujas, along with, extremely generously, a number of scores, both originals and photocopies (paper was then, as now, scarce in Cuba). One of these scores was of Javier Álvarez’s Metro Chabacano in its original version for string orchestra – a piece which also featured on Danza de las brujas. I knew nothing about the composer, though Brian Schiele, our viola player, later told me that he remembered Álvarez from his time at the Royal College of Music in London. (‘He had hair in those daysbut then so did I!’) I subsequently arranged the piece for string quartet and double bass, adding a part for side drum, as Camerata Romeu had done on Danza de las brujas. So it was that this tricky piece became a regular item in our programming, the arrangement tweaked and tightened as time went on. It was much later that we discovered that the composer had already written his own reduction of the piece for string quartet, a version that we gradually incorporated into our own, but keeping the double bass and side drum parts. Also on
Danza de las brujas was a recording of Arturo Márquez’s Homenaje a Gismonti, also included here. It was more recently that I managed to buy parts for this piece – again, in a string quartet version – which, with the addition of a double bass part, taken largely from the Camerata Romeu recording, became part of this programme.
The dates of composition on this album stretch from Estrellita in 1912 to Homenaje a Gismonti in 1993. The composers and songwriters fall roughly into four periods. All three of the songwriters are of a slightly older generation. By the start of the revolution in 1910 Manuel Ponce was already teaching at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City. He continued to write popular songs at the same time as pursuing a career as composer, teacher, music journalist and conductor. The style of these songs harks back to the drawing-room culture of the decades before the revolution; but, at the same time, he was from a young age an avid collector of folk songs and an authority on popular music of all kinds. Like all the composers represented here, he studied extensively abroad but was above all interested in creating a truly Mexican style, integrating folkloric elements into his classical compositions. His solo piano piece, Cuatro danzas mexicanas was written much later in 1941 and shows how much Ponce continued to develop his compositional style, especially following his time living in Paris between 1925 and 1933.
Our second songwriter, María Grever moved to New York during the revolution to live with her American husband, Leo Grever. She quickly established herself as a busy Hollywood composer, but also as the writer of many hundreds of Mexican boleros, some of which became popular in the United States as well as in Mexico. Her song Cuando vuelva a tu lado (When I come back to your side) is perhaps better known in its English version What a difference a day makes. Júrame (Promise me) was her first international hit.
Our final songwriter, Agustín Lara took the same tradition of romantic song but transported it from the drawing room to the streets. Lara grew up playing the piano in bars and brothels from a young age and often addresses his love songs, not to fine ladies, but to ladies of the night. Nicknamed ‘el Flaco de Oro’ (The Golden Skinny One), he cut a dashing figure with his prominent facial scar – from an argument with a showgirl in a bar – and his rakish good looks. Lara’s most famous song, Granada, is about a city which the composer had, at that time, never visited - a city of sun, blood, bullfights and beautiful women, of flowers and melancholy.
Silvestre Revueltas and Pablo Moncayo are sometimes referred to as ‘nationalist’ or ‘post-revolutionary’ composers. Growing up during the revolution but too young to be actively involved, they were both part of a
Notes on the music
post-revolutionary movement that tried to take inspiration from Aztec music and distance itself from the European mainstream. However, the problem for Mexicans looking for this new and more inclusive national identity was that Aztec culture had been systematically dismantled during four centuries of European dominance. Their approach to recreating what pre-conquest Aztec music had been like was through reading sixteenth-century descriptions, looking at artworks depicting Aztec musical performance and listening to modern folk music with Aztec elements. Moncayo’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, written towards the end of his time at the National Conservatory of Music, shows the influence of his composition teacher Carlos Chávez’s study of Aztec music. The free use of pentatonic melody, the avoidance of traditional classical modulation, the folky block chords and the dominance of particular intervals, such as the minor third and the perfect fifth, all reflect the Aztec music as described by Chávez in his 1928 lecture, La música azteca.1 Similarly, the second movement of Revuelta’s Tres piezas for violin and piano is largely pentatonic for the same reason. Elsewhere, in the outer two movements of the Tres piezas, the influence
1 See, for further information, Tonatiuh García Jiménez, ‘Assimilation and Resistance of Western Musical Culture: Traces of Nationalism in José Pablo Moncayo’s Viola Sonata’, doctoral diss., Texas Technical University, 2014. This recording uses a recent edition of the Sonata by Patricia Oropeza which has solved many performance problems in the score.
of Bartok’s folk-inspired modernism and the primitivism of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps is apparent, albeit taken to new, hair-raising extremes. It’s worth, however, pointing out that, in post-revolutionary Mexico, finding new directions in folk music or primitivism was not merely a turning away from late romanticism, as it had been in Europe, but also, more specifically, a turning away from colonial influence.
Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras, born seven years after the revolution, is sometimes described as a ‘post-nationalist’ composer. Canción en el puerto (Song in the Port) is a deceptively simple atmospheric piece in a postmodern style, but behind its simplicity is a composer with an impressive pedigree. Gutiérrez studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, Jean Rivier and Olivier Messiaen and with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti at the Julliard School in New York. During a long career as teacher, composer, music writer and radio controller, he composed a great number of film scores as well as classical works.
Arturo Márquez and Javier Álvarez are two of the most prominent and successful composers in Mexico today. Both have studied and worked abroad but are now based in Mexico where they are very active not only as composers, but also through their teaching and their promotion of contemporary music. Álvarez’s early work was in the field
of electroacoustics. Metro Chabacano was originally written in 1986 as a Christmas present for his parents, who had visited him in London a few weeks earlier and had been nonplussed by the premiere of an electroacoustic work of his. Metro Chabacano, in its first version for string orchestra, was originally called Canción de tierra y esperanza (Song of Earth and Hope). In 1990 the sculptor Marcos Jiménez approached Álvarez with the idea of using the piece to accompany one of his kinetic installations, which was to be on display in Metro Chabacano underground station in Mexico City, at which point the composer took the opportunity to arrange the piece for string quartet under its new title. A recording of the piece was subsequently played beside the kinetic sculpture for a whole three months. The constant quaver pulse and driving rhythms are curiously appropriate to this new context and title.
Arturo Márquez’s father was a mariachi musician and his grandfather a folk musician in the north of Mexico. Although he spent much of his childhood in Los Angeles, he subsequently returned to his birthplace in northern Mexico where he became director of the local band. Subsequently he went to the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City where he studied composition with Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras and Federico Ibarra and later with Jacques Castérède in Paris. Some of Márquez’s music, for example his
very popular Danzones, draw on the traditional dance music to which he was introduced as a child. Homenaje a Gismonti was written in 1993, inspired by the composer’s discovery of the music of the Brazilian guitarist, Egberto Gismonti. The piece is built over an extended vamp on alternating chords, starting with a guitar-like pizzicato. This is interspersed with passages in which minimalist repeated patterns or held chords form a background for free-flowing melody. Increasingly complex cross-rhythms and diminutions build towards the end of the piece, culminating in a final unison flourish.
Finally, a footnote about the arrangements on this album. I have asked not to be credited as arranger because I have largely transcribed other peoples’ arrangements, not through laziness, but in order to retain the authenticity of the original. For example, in both Júrame and Cuando vuelva a tu lado, I have adapted arrangements by the Mexican pianist, composer and conductor Chucho Zarzosa, which he wrote for the singer Libertad Lamarque. This borrowing is made easier nowadays by online access to recordings. One arrangement which would, perhaps, benefit from some explanation is that of Manuel Ponce’s Estrellita. In our version the first verse is arranged from Ponce’s own published score for voice and piano, while the second, instrumental, verse is from the violin and piano arrangement by the violinist
Notes on the music
Notes on the music
Jascha Heifetz. The story goes that Heifetz was in Mexico City in 1923 and found himself short of an encore. Hearing the song in a café, he jotted the tune down on a napkin, later composing an accompaniment of his own. We have also added a third and final verse which features the musical saw and is by way of a concert encore of our own, a wink to send the audience homewards smiling.
Jamie MacDougall writes: This year I celebrated my thirtieth wedding anniversary; I was blessed to marry a girl from Chihuahua in Mexico. It also marks my thirty-year love affair with the incredible music of that country – from the superb religious Baroque music of the seventeenth century to the music of Arturo Márquez, not forgetting the popular songs of Agustín Lara and the rich tradition of corrido and mariachi. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have sung on recital, concert and opera stages around the world but some of my best memories are of singing in Mexico. The response there to singing Mexican songs as encores have been some of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. Singing Granada anywhere else just doesn’t feel the same. So when Robert McFall asked me to be part of this project I jumped at it. I hope you enjoy the songs on the disc, songs that I believe are up there with the American songbook and should be much better known and more widely heard.
www.jamiemacdougall.net
© 2023 Robert McFall
1 Cuando vuelva a tu lado
¿Recuerdas aquel beso que en broma me negaste?
Se escapó de tus labios sin querer
Y asustado por ello busco abrigo
En la inmensa amargura de mi ser.
Cuando vuelva a tu lado
No me niegues tus besos
Que el amor que te he dado
No podrás olvidar
No me preguntes nada
Que nada he de explicarte
Que el beso que negaste
Ya no lo puedes dar.
Cuando vuelva a tu lado
Y estés sola conmigo
Las cosas que te digo
No repitas jamás, por compasión
Une tu labio al mío
Y estréchame en tus brazos
Y cuenta los latidos
De nuestro corazón. por compasión
Une tu labio al mío…
María Grever
When I come back to your side
Do you remember that kiss which you playfully denied me?
It escaped from your lips unintentionally
And, alarmed by this, I am seeking shelter
In the immense bitter sorrow of my being.
When I come back to your side
Please don't deny me your kisses –
Because the love I have given you
You won’t be able to forget.
Don't ask me any questions –
I don’t have to explain anything to you
The kiss you once denied me
You can no longer give me.
When I come back to your side
And you’re alone with me
The things I tell you –
Don’t ever repeat them for pity’s sake!
Join your lips to mine
And hold me in your arms
And count the heartbeats
Of our heart. for pity’s sake!
Join your lips to mine …
3 Júrame
Todos dicen que es mentira que te quiero
Porque nunca me habían visto enamorado
Yo te juro que yo mismo no comprendo El por qué me fascina tu mirada.
Cuando estoy cerca de ti estás contenta No quisiera que de nadie te acordaras.
Tengo celos hasta del pensamiento Que pueda recordarte a otra persona más.
Júrame
Que aunque pase mucho tiempo No has de olvidar este momento En que yo te conocí.
Mírame, Pues no hay nada más profundo Ni más grande en este mundo Que el cariño que te di.
Bésame
Con un beso enamorado, Como nadie me ha besado Desde el día en que nací.
Quiéreme, Quiéreme hasta la locura
Así sabrás la amargura
Que estoy sufriendo por ti.
Quiéreme, Quiéreme hasta la locura …
María Grever
Promise Me
Everyone says it's a lie that I love you
Because they’d never seen me in love.
I swear I myself can't understand
Just why I am so spellbound by your gaze..
When I am close to you, you are happy. I don’t want you to think about anyone else.
I'm jealous even of any thought That might remind you of another person.
Promise me
That, even when much time has passed, You will not forget that moment
When I first met you.
Look at me,
For there is nothing more profound Or vaster in this world
Than the love I gave you.
Kiss me
With a passionate kiss
As no one else has kissed me
Since the day I was born.
Love me
Love me to the point of madness; That way you’ll know the bitter sorrow That I am suffering for you.
Love me
Love me to the point of madness …
Texts and translations
5 Arráncame la vida
En estas noches de frío
De duro cierzo invernal
Llegan hasta el cuarto mío
Las quejas del arrabal.
En estas noches de frío …
¡Arráncame la vida
Con el último beso de amor!
¡Arráncala, toma mi corazón!
Arráncame la vida
Y si acaso te hiere el dolor
Ha de ser de no verme
Porque al fin, tus ojos
Me los llevo yo
La canción que pedías
Te la vengo a cantar
La llevaba en el alma
La llevaba escondida
Y te la voy a dar.
¡Arráncame la vida
Con el último beso de amor …
Agustín Lara
Tear Out My Life!
On these cold nights, with their wintry, harsh north winds, the cries from the outskirts reach all the way to my bedroom.
On these cold nights …
Tear out my life!
with one last kiss of love!
Tear it out, take my heart!
Tear out my life
And if you're maybe hurt by the pain it will be from not being able to see me, because in the end I'll be taking your eyes with me.
The song you requested, I'm coming to sing it to you, I was carrying it in my soul, I was carrying it hidden there And I'll give it to you.
Tear out my life with one last kiss of love ...
10
Por ti mi corazón
Por ti mi corazón
Fue un talismán divino
Por ti fue la ilusión
Un astro en mi destino
Por ti fue mi pasión
En un árbol un trino
Que brota y alegra el camino
Como una canción.
Luis Gonzaga Urbina (1864–1934)12 Granada
Granada, tierra soñada por mí
Mi cantar se vuelve gitano cuando es para ti
Mi cantar hecho de fantasía
Mi cantar flor de melancolía
Que yo te vengo a dar
Granada, tierra ensangrentada
En tardes de toros
Mujer que conserva el embrujo De los ojos moros
Te sueño rebelde y gitana
Cubierta de flores
Y beso tu boca de grana
Jugosa manzana
Que me habla de amores.
ForYou My Heart
For you my heart
Was a divine talisman; For you unbounded hope was A star in my destiny; For you my passion was A birdcall from a tree
That bursts out and brightens the way Like a song.
Granada
Granada, land of my dreams
My song turns gypsy when it's sung for you, My song, created of fantasy, My song, flower of melancholy, That I’m coming to give you.
Granada! Blood-stained earth
On bullfighting afternoons, A woman who retains the enchantment Of those Moorish eyes, I dream of you as a rebel and gypsy, Covered in flowers
And I kiss your crimson mouth, Juicy apple
That speaks to me of loves.
Texts and translations
Mr McFall’s Chamber
Granada manola
Cantada en coplas preciosas
No tengo otra cosa que darte
Que un ramo de rosas
De rosas de suave fragancia
Que le dieran marco a la virgen morena
Granada, tu tierra está llena
De lindas mujeres
De sangre y de Sol
José
Mojica (1895–1974)19 Estrellita
Estrellita del lejano cielo
Que miras mi dolor
Que sabes mi sufrir
Baja y dime si me quiere un poco
Porque yo no puedo sin su amor vivir.
Estrellita del lejano cielo …
¡Tú eres estrella, mi faro de amor!
Tú sabes que pronto he de morir.
Baja y dime si me quiere un poco
Porque yo no puedo sin su amor vivir
¡Tú eres estrella, mi faro de amor! …
Manuel Ponce
Granada, fine woman,
Sung of in glorious couplets, I have nothing else to give you
Except a bunch of roses
Of sweet-smelling roses
That frame the statue of the Black Madonna.
Granada, your land is full
Of beautiful women
Of blood and of sun.
Little Star
Little star of the distant sky
Who sees my pain
Who knows of my suffering
Come down and tell me if she loves me a little
Because I cannot live without her love.
Little star of the distant sky …
You are a star, my beacon of love!
You know that soon I must die.
Come down and tell me if she loves me a little
Because I cannot live without her love.
You are a star, my beacon of love! …
Mr McFall’s Chamber was formed in 1996 as a response to what seemed to us to be an increasingly narrowing audience for classical music in Scotland at that time. The original string quintet (string quartet with double bass) played in nightclubs and offered a radical mixture of types of music, some popular, some more way-out. During its early years, the group ran a monthly music event at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club called None of the Above, which tried to bring together music from a number of very different genres. More recently the group, often with a more extended line-up than in its earliest days, has tended to take over concert halls instead, while still offering repertoire which spans the divide between classical and non-classical.
The group has commissioned many new works, starting with Edward McGuire’s Nocturnes and James MacMillan’s Cumnock Fair in 1999. Other commissions have included works from Cecilia McDowall, Kenneth Dempster, Phil Bancroft, Chick Lyall, Gavin Bryars, Martin Kershaw, Tim Garland, Phil Alexander, Paul Harrison, Matilda Brown, Dave Heath, Fraser Fifield, James Ross, Corrina Hewat, Aidan O’Rourke, Joel Rust, Martin Suckling, Vivian BartyTaylor, Mike Kearney, Jeremy Thurlow, Errollyn Wallen, Gillian Fleetwood and Amble Skuse.
The group has appeared many times on Radio 3 and on Radio Scotland. In 2016 the group was shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society
award. In 2018, the group’s members were voted New Music Performers of the Year in the Scottish Awards for New Music.
The group has collaborated and recorded with a number of singer/songwriters, including Michael Marra, Valentina Montoya Martínez and, more recently, Dominic Harris (of Dominic Waxing Lyrical). It has also set up many educational projects around Scotland, such as North Ayrshire’s Tango Fest, in which more than three hundred young string pupils performed a programme of traditional tango numbers with the group. It has worked in hospitals and schools. Through the annual Distil Project, it has workshopped and premiered many compositions over the years by composers from a traditional music background. Likewise, it has collaborated with many jazz and tango musicians. Since 2009 the group has recorded a number of CDs for Delphian Records. Repertoire has included music by Gavin Bryars, Martyn Bennett, Michael Marra and Valentina Montoya Martínez. Solitudes (DCD34156), which contained a programme of music from the Eastern Baltic, was Gramophone Magazine’s ‘CD of the month’ when it came out in 2015. More recently, the group has released a recording of Astor Piazzolla’s María de Buenos Aires (DCD34186) and Born in Dirt an’ Din (DCD34210) featuring music by composers with a background in jazz, much of it commissioned by the group over the years.
Texts and translations
Piazzolla: María de Buenos Aires
Valentina Montoya Martínez, Nicholas Mulroy, Juanjo Lopez Vidal narrator, Mr McFall’s Chamber
DCD34186 (2 discs)
According to Horacio Ferrer, author of the text for this unconventional ‘operita’, its highly poetic libretto was written ‘not to be understood, but to create emotion and atmosphere’. Piazzolla’s music, too, offers a charged mix of classical forms and Argentinian traditions – milonga, canyengue, tango, candombe, payada ... Mr McFall’s Chamber are joined by regular collaborators and by the narrator Juanjo Lopez Vidal in the work’s first major recording since the 1980s.
‘Rhythms are crisp and precise, and the pristine sound brings out plenty of sharply focused instrumental detail. Montoya Martínez, her voice earthy and lived-in, captures the defiance and vitality that drive María on ... Exhilaratingly done’ — Gramophone, January 2018
Solitudes: Baltic Reflections
Mr McFall’s Chamber
DCD34156
No one knows quite when tango was established in Finland, but the style has a long history there – still little known to outsiders – and combines rhythmic interest and yearning melody with a distinctively Nordic melancholy. In this ingeniously curated programme, two Finnish tangos from the 1950s and a tango-based work by Finnish classical composer Aulis Sallinen are woven into a bold tapestry of music from the Eastern Baltic seaboard. Longing, sadness, and a heightened sense of nature infuse all of these works, which also reveal intriguing stylistic connections. These original compositions are complemented by Robert McFall’s own sensitive arrangements for a core McFall’s line-up of five strings and piano, and the programme culminates in a truly unique version of Sibelius’s famous Finlandia Hymn
‘Full marks for originality of concept and for execution, which has all this ensemble’s trademark style and communicative nous, and for a fascinating booklet-note by Ivan Moody’ — Gramophone, September 2015
Born in Dirt an’ Din
Mr McFall’sChamber
DCD34210
For over a decade, Mr McFall’s Chamber has from time to time supplemented its core string line-up with a jazz trio of piano, bass and drums, often with an additional wind player as soloist – a role fulfilled here by Maximiliano Martín’s virtuosic clarinet. This typically eclectic programme showcases some of the results of these collaborations. Newly commissioned works from Tim Garland, Paul Harrison, Martin Kershaw and Mike Kearney sit alongside Robert McFall’s own arrangements of playful, cartoon-like short numbers by the renowned American composer, bandleader and inventor Raymond Scott.
‘Born in Dirt an’ Din presents the past through a futuristic post-industrial lens … Another excellent, high-quality offering from Mr McFall’s Chamber’
— Gramophone, Awards issue 2019
Michael Marra: live on tour 2010
Michael Marra, Mr McFall’s Chamber
DCD34092
Robert McFall writes: When we toured with Michael in 2010 we had, of course, no idea that he would only be with us for a further two years. Looking back on it I’m hugely relieved that we made these recordings when we could, that we helped capture what a Michael Marra performance was like, down to his impeccably presented and hilarious introductions. For some time before the collaboration some of us had been faithful fans of his, and we feel blessed to have had the opportunity to be, for an all too brief few weeks, his backing band.
‘Aficionados will know Marra’s utterly idiosyncratic material ... but the sympathetic McFall’s settings bring a new, almost cinematic element, managing to complement the frequent quirkiness of these songs while emphasising the compassion which glows amid the surrealism’
— The Scotsman, November 2010
PRESTO Editor’s Choice
La Pasionaria
Valentina Montoya Martínez, Mr McFall’s Chamber
DCD34120
Valentina Montoya Martínez’s songs of life as a Chilean exile are complemented by the music of the tango nuevo, including songs and instrumental interludes from Astor Piazzolla’s ‘operita’ María de Buenos Aires, where the character of María represents the tango itself. ‘La Pasionaria’ was the nickname of Dolores Ibárruri, a Basque Communist leader during the Spanish Civil War. Likewise both engaged and passionate, the songs brought together here – including Valentina’s deeply personal odes to her late mother and to the political activist Sola Sierra – pay tribute to the private and public lives of women across Spain and Latin America.
‘hugely engaging ... A glorious, loveable disc’ — The Arts Desk, August 2013
Christmas in Puebla
Siglo de Oro & instrumentalists / Patrick Allies
DCD34238
By the early 1620s, when Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla migrated from Cádiz to New Spain (modern-day Mexico), the colony was a wealthy outpost of the Habsburg Empire, keen to maintain the religious and musical customs of its mother country. At the cathedral of the young, thriving city of Puebla de los Ángeles, Padilla had at his disposal a sizeable body of men and boys who not only sang but also played instruments – including guitars, sackbut, dulcian, and simple percussion such as the cajón. Siglo de Oro’s programme explores the rich soundworld of this time and place through the reconstruction of a Mass at Christmas Eve, including a number of villancicos – energetic, dance-like pieces whose captivating mixture of Mexican, Afro-Hispanic and Portuguese influences would have invigorated even the most sober churchgoer.
‘A sonic festive feast’ — Choir & Organ, December 2020, FIVE STARS
Birds & Beasts: music by Martyn Bennett and Fraser Fifield
Mr McFall’s Chamber
DCD34085
Martyn Bennett was one of Scotland’s most innovative musicians, combining the traditional and modern, the local and the international. A long-planned collaboration with Mr McFall’s Chamber was never realised during his tragically short lifetime. For the group’s second disc with Delphian, Robert McFall has put together a programme of his own sympathetic arrangements of Martyn’s music alongside original works by Fraser Fifield, another of Scotland’s virtuosic musical innovators. The premiere recording of Bennett’s Piece for string quartet, percussion and Scottish smallpipes epitomises his sophisticated mastery of fusion.
‘a satisfying, serpentine dalliance of whistle, violin and percussion’
— The Independent, May 2010
Romaria: choral music from Brazil
Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge / Geoffrey Webber
DCD34147
‘Romaria’, a word suggesting pilgrimage, crowds, and processions, evokes much of what is special and distinctive about modern Brazil – its mix of people, its extraordinary vibrancy, its faith. Geoffrey Webber and his ever-adventurous choir sing both sacred and secular works dating from the1950s through to the present, in a programme developed in conjunction with experts from the University of São Paulo’s music department.
‘Performances are consistently stunning. Diction is impeccable, and the whole packs an exhilarating, very un-English punch. Magical, and magnificently recorded’ — The Arts Desk, May 2015
