Casi Una Pregunta, Casi Una Respuesta (Almost a Question, Almost an Answer): Latin American Piano Music in the 21st Century Review
MARTHA MARCHENA, internationally acclaimed Cuban-American pianist, once again gives the world at large the present of her artistry at the service of Latin American art music composers. When others make their mark interpreting and recording works by the European master composers of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries with some excursions into the first four decades of the twentieth , Marchena has almost exclusively devoted her life to interpreting and recording on discs dozen after dozen of piano works from Mexico, Central America, the Caríbbean and South America. Such a task has become by now a noble crusade to preserve and bring to the attention of the world music long neglected, belonging to a part of Western Culture mostly ignored by the axis USA-Europe. This powerful and peculiar axis which knows how many bells hang in a given Cambodian temple, how many types of Buddhist chants exist, or how many elephants were kept in the preserves of the Maharajah of Kaipur in 1752 rarely has paid attention to the splendidly varied and rich arts from South of the Rio Grande, except in their folkloric, commercial or popular culture aspects. So, when Martha Marchena plays art music works from Cuban Juan Piñera, Panamanian Roque Cordero, Salvadorian Germán Cáceres, Mexican Mario Lavista or Puerto Rican Carlos Vázquez, she brings to life compositions by masters of the New World who do not have to apologize for their musical creativity.
In this, her most recent recording of Latin American piano works, Marchena brings forth, once more, her impeccable technique, her deep commitment to the works she interprets, her exquisite sound so close to many of the demands of this music , her vigorous and thorough understanding of the rhythmic vitality of these compositions, and her never erring delivery of the structure and inner workings of this invigorating music.
Marchena has selected for this recording a series of works which go in time from the Toccata of Aurelio de la Vega, written in 1957, to the Rapsodia Acquamarina of Carlos Alberto Vázquez, of 1999, or the two short pieces of Juan Piñera (from his Book before Breakfast), also written in this same year. These compositions reflect many of the styles, procedures and gestures that informed the music of the Twentieth Century, underlined here and there by melo-rhythmic figures derived from the diverse and opulent panoply of Latin American folk and popular music. Nationalistic touches are evident in certain of the works; in others they are very subtle and diluted or not present at all. In general, all the compositions reveal a vigorous, motoric discourse, which makes the music communicative, direct and appealing. Read more...
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