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]

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 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 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.

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.

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