Hemispheric roots: ISO pays a visit to classical music in the New World

Drawn from the streets and plazas and pampas of peoples settled in the larger American neighborhood is plenty of music that salutes European forebears at a safe distance. In the 20th century, composers in the Western Hemisphere drew sustenance from how they applied their training to creating new music. But much of that new music found its wellsprings in popular and folk music.

Canadian violinist James Ehnes looked southward.

The musical hegemony of Europe, particularly the Austro-German heritage, continues in large part. Yet one way to avoid both the dead ends of modernism and pale continuation of the Romantic past was for them to explore what lay in their own backyards and appropriate it for concert music.  In the case of the young Darius Milhaud, he simply changed backyards to Brazil when he was young and impressionable and came up with "Le Boeuf sur le toit" after returning to his native France.

One version of Milhaud's boisterous, lyrical evocation of Brazilian high times (linked to a grotesque Cocteau scenario back home) was how guest artist James Ehnes reintroduced himself to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra audience Friday night in a concert titled "Greetings from Latin America."  (The program will be repeated at Hilbert Circle Theatre at 5:30 this afternoon.)

A "cinema fantasy" on Milhaud's hit composition brought the violinist onstage, collaborating with guest

Juanjo Mena: this weekend's tour guide 

conductor Juanjo Mena. The role of the solo instrument, which at least gets a flashy cadenza, is deeply enfolded in Milhaud's pastiche of musical styles he became acquainted with in Rio de Janeiro, linked by a recurring original tune. 

The irrepressible piece whetted the appetite for two more solo turns by Ehnes after the intermission. The Allegro moderato finale of Jose White's Violin Concerto found the guest at home in this little-known piece by a 19th-century Cuban — so much so that the movement's main theme found him pressing ahead, leading a little too much toward forcing the pace. The rapport of soloist and conductor remained basically intact, however. The work is a tidy display of mainstream Romanticism that deserves an occasional outing.

Mellowness and the opportunity to revel in the sad side of tango came in Astor Piazzolla's  "Oblivion," a gem that displayed the collegial gifts Ehnes had to share with the ISO string sections. 

Before and after Ehnes' appearances came several opportunities for spectacles using a wide orchestral palette, with an emphasis on percussion and brass. The borrowings on which the pieces rested varied. Arturo Marquez's "Danzon No. 2," which concludes the program, brings to the fore the dance form of the title. Like the tango as treated often by Piazzolla, in a sensitive composer's hands the pliancy of the form and its characteristic rhythms can accommodate a wide expressive range. On Friday, "Danzon No. 2" had a measured sensuality and a thumping rhythmic drive that made it the majestic crown of all the greetings. 

Heitor Villa-Lobos' "Ouverture de l'Homme tel" presented the concert's calling card. It reflected the Brazilian composer's magpie tendencies as it rose climactically to a parody of the galop that ends Rossini's hugely familiar "William Tell" Overture. Carlos Chavez's "Sinfonia India" gets extensive mileage out of the Mexican composer's interest in the dances and songs of his country's native peoples. A percussion kaleidoscope, it is saturated in its culture in a manner that, especially in the lyrical portions, resembles what Chavez's friend Aaron Copland found most useful in American folk music. Across both pieces were evocative solos from trombone, oboe, and horn — among other spotlight moments for ISO musicians.

The other set of "greetings" coming from Argentina moves from the capital on to the vast pampas: the prairies and grasslands known for cattle and wheat and the relatively few people required to care for that agricultural bounty. Four dances from Alberto Ginasera's "Estancia" focused the attention serially on land workers, wheat farmers, and cattlemen. 

The "danza final" is a pulse-quickening summary of the energies released by those lifestyles as Ginastera, who later became a full-bored modernist, conceived them. Friday's performance could well have had ISO patrons dancing in the aisles, if the rhythmic shifts and surprising distribution of strong, recurrent accents could be spontaneously mastered. But they can't, of course, so listening to the spectacle laid out with as much spirit as the orchestra managed Friday was sufficient. It will presumably be so this evening as well.