Music Reviews : Mexican String Quartets at Schoenberg

It could have been a major event, a perfect opportunity to delve deeply (finally) into Mexico’s contemporary music repertory.

The inaugural event in UCLA’s Mexican Chamber Music Series certainly had all the trappings: performers including the Mexico City String Quartet and a leading Mexican mezzo-soprano; a world premiere work with texts by Chicano poet Jose Montoya, especially commissioned for the concert; a long list of sponsors, including the Mexican Consulate of Los Angeles, numerous UCLA organizations, and the Ford Foundation.

Somehow the concert--in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA Tuesday--turned out a more routine, somewhat botched, affair. The Mexico City String Quartet--Roman Revueltas Retes (nephew of Silvestre Revueltas) and Michael Meissner, violins, Piotr Vodopianov, viola, Vladimir Zarubin, cello--turned out to be major in name only, thoroughly slapdash in execution, amazingly amateurish in presentation.

The program booklet dispensed with composer’s biographies, didn’t even include their dates, and omitted musical commentary as well as a number of movement listings.

All strange and too bad for a concert devoted to rarely heard music, part of an effort to “educate” the community. There was some musical compensation however, despite the meager qualities of most of the performances.

The highlight came at the end with the String Quartet No. 2 (“Los Magueyes”) by Revueltas. This brief, three-movement work is a tour de force of quirkiness, full of rhythmic games and quick lurches from style to style. One never knows quite where it’s going--and that seems to be most of its witty point.

More predictable, though no less intriguing, was the String Quartet No. 4 by Manuel Enriquez, a solid piece of atonal texture music on the models of Lutoslawski and Xenakis.

The world premiere of Thomas Pasatieri’s “Canciones del Barrio” for piano quintet and mezzo, on bilingual texts by Montoya, proved disappointing. Though Pasatieri’s vocal lines revealed flowing, idiomatic expressivity (sung elegantly and dramatically by Adriana Diaz de Leon), the instrumental setting remained mostly in a mushy, neo-Romantic vein, full of harmonic and melodic cliches. The 23-minute work--with the composer at the piano--obtained a certain urgency at times, but usually rose only to the level of finely crafted, slightly weepy film music.

The Cuarteto Virreinal by Miguel Bernal Jimenez was puzzling in its way, a straightforward, Classical--forget ‘neo’--string quartet, with just a tinge of Mexican folk music in it. Rounding out the program were quartets by Salvados Contreras (No. 2), a lyrically contrapuntal, ostinato-laden work, and by Manuel de Elias, a piquantly atonal, vigorous and ethereal discourse. Hasty approximation characterized the performances.