Julíán Orbón was born in Spain to Cuban parents and returned to Cuba at age 14. He considered himself a Cuban composer even though he left the island after the 1960 revolution, first teaching in Mexico City and finally settling in New York in 1964. His music was influenced by Catholic liturgy, Gregorian chant and by his colleagues Manuel de Falla, Carlos Chávez and Heitor Villa-Lobos. His early music was neo-classical, but turned romantic later in life.

Composed in 1953, Tres versiones sinfónicas also shows the influence of Orbon’s teacher, Aaron Copland. While Orbón doesn’t explain his precise meaning for the term “versión,” we can understand it as a kind of free variation. Each of the movements consists of a single brief theme and creates a fantasy on it that spreads far beyond its music-historical boundaries.

Pavane: The pavane is a stately sixteenth-century Spanish dance. The folk etymology attributes the title to the gait of the peacock (pavana). However, it probably refers to a dance from the Italian city of Padua (Padova). Dances in the Renaissance were often performed in pairs (slow-fast), and Orbón’s “version” adheres to this pattern. The stately theme that begins this movement morphs into increasingly rapid variations.

Conductus: Orbón draws his inspiration from the medieval non-liturgical poetry and religious processionals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As the movement begins, it replicates the restrictive harmonic language of that period; Orbón builds his harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary from there. Like Musorgsky’s oxcart in Pictures at an Exhibition, the procession builds to a climax and fades into the distance.

Xylophone: This rapid syncopated perpetual motion, the most Latin-American movement of the piece, opens with an eponymous theme. 

Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com