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Mexican 'classics' receive a rare hearing

No government has built a wall as apparently impenetrable as the cultural rampart that keeps the classical music of Mexico and other Latin American countries out of the U.S. consciousness. Audiences here have to scramble to name Mexico's leading composers - or Chile's, or Colombia's, or . . ..

No government has built a wall as apparently impenetrable as the cultural rampart that keeps the classical music of Mexico and other Latin American countries out of the U.S. consciousness. Audiences here have to scramble to name Mexico's leading composers - or Chile's, or Colombia's, or . . ..

In attempting to scale that wall, the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra began its second season Thursday with Mexican "classics," works by early 20th-century composers whose names, at least, are known. Conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson led what may have been the first local readings of music by Silvestre Revueltas, Manuel Ponce and Jose Pablo Moncayo in a Hispanic Heritage concert at Temple University's renovated Baptist Temple.

Her orchestra embodies her musical aims; its players are of many races and nationalities molded into a far-reaching definition of "e pluribus unum." She has shaped an ensemble that shows keen rhythmic awareness and appealing energy without constraining individual contributions.

Her program also raised a problem Hispanic composers confront: How indigenous can they be without appearing parochial, and how cosmopolitan can they be without denying their heritage?

Revueltas and Moncayo chose their roots; Ponce, who had studied in Italy, Germany, and France, chose the Esperanto of the 1920s. His string work Estampas Nocturnas is crafted with deft counterpoint, and the conductor clarified the flow of lines admirably. It would be hard to place the music ethnically. The second movement is a quaint gavotte, and the other three explore ideas that only occasionally reflect Ponce's heritage.

Revueltas, on the other hand, was a true original. His Homaje a Federico Garcia Lorca, for 12 instruments, showers the stage with color. His meters evolve like lightning, upstart instruments take the lead, tradition is trampled in the most good-natured way. He wrote for tuba as if it were a violin, and Matthew Brown raced and galloped through the work like the concertmaster he was meant to be. Revueltas wasted no notes in shaping tunes made of bits by several instruments, outbursts, murmurs. It is music that shouts its heritage and could have been written, in Spanish, by Til Eulenspiegel.

Moncayo's Huapango expanded the horizons of meter and pulse. Percussion added vitality and spirit to the reading in what was a rousing finale.

Johnson had opened with Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3 (from an opera set in a Spanish prison). It did not provide much context, and although the notes were there, the piece needed more study.