Latin Touches And Others

Published: August 11, 2016

Originally Published By: Infodad.com

It has become commonplace for contemporary “classical” composers to produce music that is often not recognizably “classical” in any meaningful sense. Instead it is “crossover” music, with a shape and heritage of its own – or rather multiple heritages, since it draws on some mixture of “world music” (that is, non-Western, non-European material), jazz, popular tunes, rock, blues; the list goes on and on. Listeners attracted to this sort of musical blend have a great many places to find it: one of the issues with the style (for composers if not necessarily for an audience) is that it sounds so similar no matter who has put a particular set of influences together. There is generally very little distinctive about blended music by Composer A vs. that of Composer B, and this can actually be good for listeners, who can seek out works by unfamiliar composers with some assurance that they will find the style congenial. But it can be off-putting for listeners not (or not yet) enamored of the combinatorial approach, who cannot be quite sure where to turn for samples of this type of music. Some releases do try to make it easier to approach musical blends. Havana Moon from Steinway & Sons, for example, mixes a couple of short, evocative, authentically Latinate piano works by Heitor Villa-Lobos (Skyline of New York and Valsa da Dor) with Latin-influenced pieces by three contemporary composers. The three are Paquito D’Rivera (born 1948), who contributes The Cape Cod Files (four movements), Habanera, Contradanza and Vals Venezolano; Miguel del Águila (born 1957), whose Tango Trio, Nocturne and Silence are heard here; and bandoneón player J.P. Jofre (born 1983), whose works on this CD are Sweet Dreams and Primavera. Several of the pieces are world première recordings, and all are quite well handled by performers who are clearly comfortable playing “fusion” music whose Latin traditions blend with a mellow jazz sound and, frequently, pleasantly rhythmic dancelike melodies. The Villa-Lobos miniatures are pleasant enough, but it is D’Rivera’s The Cape Cod Files, two movements that open the CD and two that close it, that offers the widest variety of moods and the most interesting instrumentation. The remaining pieces here are pleasant enough but rather forgettable, with little sign of compositional distinction among the works or their composers.

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