‘Everything is rhythm. That’s what music is to me. My rhythms are booming, dynamic, tactile, visual. I think in images that move dynamically.’ So wrote Silvestre Revueltas, the Mexican composer whose epic La noche de los Mayas has just been released on DG by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. The work culminates in an orgy of sound propelled by no less than eleven percussionists. Coupled with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring it makes for a spectacular experience.
“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.
‘This is quasi-Stravinsky with a Latin-American accent and with a greater emphasis on the spectacular, the lyrical and the more obviously colourful, but there is also a subtlety that Dudamel appreciates and to which the orchestra responds . . . if Revueltas is a passion, the CD is a must.’Daily Telegraph (Geoffrey Norris), 13 June 2010
‘The extremely wide-ranging recording will delight thrill-seekers, and this disc will no doubt introduce a new listenership to the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940), whose colourful, posthumously-compiled suite, La noche de los mayas, has a horde of improvising percussionists in its finale.’Irish Times (Michael Dervan), 30 July 2010