XVI Festival Latinoamericano de Música, Day 3

On 28 May I missed most of the first concert due to transport difficulties. On my minibus was travelling the Argentine Cecilia Villanueva, whose En línea was in the programme. We arrived over an hour late, to the pleasant surprise that the organisers had engineered a rolling postponement of En línea, so that, on our arrival, the composer was able to slip into the hall right in time to hear her piece. It was a disciplined study in pitch range-demarcated textures for predominantly low instruments.

The evening concert, by Orquesta Filarmónica de Caracas conducted by German Cáceres, began with Alba Potes’s Cantares para orquesta, a rich fabric of colour and texture. Then came the second movement of Una música escondida. The idea of performing this movement only had been a practical solution emerging from discussions in the wake of the aforementioned personnel and timing difficulties. I was uneasy about being represented by such an atypical, personal utterance, with none of the traits that I consider my trademark, but showing instead a directness of expression which in the context of the whole work was a risk, but on its own had the potential to be perceived as naïve. I therefore asked to introduce the piece so as to put it in context. Whether the introduction helped I am unsure; it certainly did not help my unease.  But this was a festival and there was plenty of interesting music to hear and interesting people to meet, so I thought it pointless to dwell on this discomfort.

Next came Carlos Castro’s Concierto del Sol for guitar and orchestra, performed with authority by the superb guitarist Rubén Riera. Ricardo Teruel’s Concertino No. 2 for concertina, percussion, electric bass and orchestra explored its unusual combination of soloists with exuberance. German Cáceres’s Violin Concerto came across as the evening’s most serious music, showing the telltale signs of pre-compositional pitch organisation and a rhetoric that situates it in the context of such American symphonists as William Schumann.  

XVI Festival Latinoamericano de Música, Day 2

Marcha por la autonomía universitaria vista desde el piso 16 del Hotel Alba, Caracas 27 de mayo de 2010  

The main event of the following day - 27 May - was the concert by Ensamble CG from Colombia. They had given a workshop the previous day, during which their commitment to new music and to working together had been made apparent. This concert put these qualities very much in evidence, displaying a technical handling and a tightness rarely heard in new music ensembles. It would be invidious to single out individual pieces in their very well-chosen programme, but I will do so on special grounds: because she was the festival’s main dynamo, Diana Arismendi, whose Epigramas showed a sensitive use of voice, guitar and percussion and a gift for harmonic clarity. And, because this was a celebrations of her seventieth birthday, Graciela Paraskevaídis’s nada, a piece I found arresting in every respect. The simplicity of the material, written for the stark forces of one solo voice with nearly no text, gathered momentum through the simple device of progressive ascent in pitch, until the intensity was almost unbearable. This exposed structure was superbly paced by the singer Beatriz Elena Martínez, whose control and absolute immersion in the piece were breath-taking. 

This was to be the day of the first rehearsal of my Una música escondida by Orquesta Filarmónica de Caracas. There were timing difficulties and personnel difficulties, as a result of which the rehearsal ended before my piece could be practised. 

XVI Festival Latinoamericano de Música

On an invitation from the Festival’s co-directors, Venezuelan composers Alfredo Rugeles and Diana Arismendi, I was able to extricate myself from the frenzy of end-of-year admin at ICMuS  to fly to Caracas for five days. This was not the festival’s entirety but a section of it, for my hosts had been kind enough to invite me to attend the festival in whole or in part. Three pieces of mine were to be performed: Trío, Una música escondida and the song cycle Alquimia. Shortly before my departure for Caracas I discovered that two of these had been dropped, leaving Una música escondida to be played by Orquesta Filarmónica de Caracas under the Salvadorean composer and conductor German Cáceres.  

This was to be my first visit to Venezuela since 1977, when as principal viola with the Bolivian Youth Orchestra I had attended a festival of youth orchestras instigated by the then young El Sistema, the brainchild of José Antonio Abreu. I had then had occasion to admire the wealth of talent and the plethora of rich personalities that country seems to brim over with.

Accommodation was at Hotel Alba. This had formerly been the Caracas Hilton but it had some time ago been taken over by the government, who was, reportedly, determined to keep it as a five-star hotel while making it accessible to ordinary Venezuelans and visitors coming on official business. Were this a different kind of blog I should like to expand on Hotel Alba, but, since it is a music blog, suffice it to say that Hotel Alba looks and feels like its days of glory are over and its days of life are numbered. Thanks, however, to receptionist Angel Domínguez for sorting out my internet connection. 

Encounter in La Paz

October will see the centenary of Conservatorio Nacional de Música, one of the most venerable musical institutions of Bolivia. For this great occasion a small team of visionaries has put together an Encounter of Bolivian Musicians, bringing together an array of musical personalities connected with the Conservatorio, which means, give or take, all the country's main musicians and composers. The original proposal had been to bring back to Bolivia all those who are working abroad too, and the instigator, a dynamo of energy and inspiration by the name of Luz Bolivia Sánchez, had secured the funding to make this possible. The fact that this extended reunion of expatriates is going to take place only partially and that the scope of the events is going to be scaled down is due to circumstances that I would like to understand better before I decry them on these pages, but the fact that the Encounter is going ahead at all is a tribute to Luz Bolivia's enormous dedication, inspiration and powers of persuasion.

The Encounter will take place between 4 and 12 October. The schedule is still being worked on, but I so far know that there will be two performances of my Una música escondida (A Hidden Music) by the Conservatoire Orchestra conducted by Bolivia's foremost conductor, Ramiro Soriano, and with Grace Rodríguez at the piano. Performances of other pieces are in preparation, I am told, and I will mention them when I know more.