La noche de los Mayas
Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) / Arr. José Yves Limantour

[1939]

Silvestre Revueltas was a violin prodigy whose talents took him from his native Mexico to Texas and Chicago for a world-class conservatory education. He returned to his homeland in 1929, when his peer Carlos Chávez invited him to be the Assistant Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico. Over the next decade he made vital contributions to the Mexican music scene in a period when the young republic, still raw from revolution, was hungry to establish an independent national identity. At a time when other Mexican composers were trying to reconcile old European styles with old Mexican folk sources, Revueltas’ concert works and film scores stood out for their embrace of current dance music styles and the Afro-Caribbean rhythms that fueled them. He was just beginning to establish an international reputation when he died at the age of 40.

The music heard here rearranges cues that Revueltas wrote for the 1939 film La noche de los Mayas (The Night of the Mayas) into a symphonic suite. In the scherzo-like second movement and especially in the wild finale, Revueltas’ faithful adaptations of dance patterns and polyrhythms rooted in Indigenous cultures and the African diaspora prove how well he managed to translate authentic Mexican sounds into an orchestral idiom.

Two piccolos, two flutes, two oboes, two E-flat clarinets, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, strings