Dudamel’s Dynamite – Le Sacre and La noche de los Mayas
Gustavo Dudamel’s two full-frontal force orchestral pieces elicit high octane playing from his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. Both Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Revueltas’s La noche de los Mayas are revealed as models of revolutionary music making.
In Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky transformed painter Nicholas Roerich’s fleeting vision of a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of Spring into a musical simulation of barbaric primality.
La noche de los Mayas, originally scored for a 1939 film, is one of Mexico’s musical treasures. This concert suite, edited by José Ives Limantour, dating to 1961, evokes a mystical lost world.
Gustavo Dudamel: Rite
"There is inside me a very peculiar understanding of nature", the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas once wrote. "Everything is rhythm. That's what music is to me. My rhythms are booming, dynamic, tactile, visual. I think in images that move dynamically." There could hardly be a better description of Revueltas's La noche de los Mayas or of Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, the two works in Gustavo Dudamel's new recording with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (SBYOV).
"All these dances have a youthful energy", says Gustavo Dudamel. "Spring reflects a new beginning, something important to young people. I've known the Sacre since my first concert as a thirteen-year-old violinist in my hometown orchestra. Now it's also an important piece for the SBYOV. We first played it in 2009 in London, Madrid, Lisbon and, of course, several times in Venezuela. This orchestra simply have these rhythms in their blood - they even make one passage sound like heavy metal."
Powerful dance rhythms also dominate Revueltas's music for a 1939 film about the cultural clash between a tribe of Mayans and the modern world. Like Stravinsky's great ballet, the symphonic suite La noche de los Mayas is evocative, ritualistic music, and it ends with a wild sacrificial dance calling for elevenpercussionists. "It makes a perfect coupling for the Sacre", exclaims Gustavo Dudamel. And this explosive, mysteriously atmospheric coupling makes aperfect program for the most dynamic conductor and young musicians in the world today.
4/2010
1. The Rite of Spring - Introduction
2. The Rite of Spring - The Augurs of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls
3. The Rite of Spring - Ritual of Abduction
4. The Rite of Spring - Spring Rounds
5. The Rite of Spring - Ritual of the Rival Tribes
6. The Rite of Spring - Procession of the Sage
7. The Rite of Spring - The Sage
8. The Rite of Spring - Dance of the Earth
9. The Rite of Spring - Introduction (Largo)
10. The Rite of Spring - Mystic Circles of the Young Girls
11. The Rite of Spring - Glorification of the Chosen One
12. The Rite of Spring - Evocation of the Ancestors
13. The Rite of Spring - Ritual Action of the Ancestors
14. The Rite of Spring - Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One)
15. La noche de los Mayas (Night of the Maya) - Noche de los Mayas (Molto sostenuto)
16. La noche de los Mayas (Night of the Maya) - Noche de Jaranas (Scherzo)
17. La noche de los Mayas (Night of the Maya) - Noche de Yucatan (Andante espressivo)
18. La noche de los Mayas (Night of the Maya) - Noche de Encantamiento (Tema y variaciones)
19. Digital-only Exclusive Bonus track: Dansa brasileira
