Composed c.1910; 22 minutes

In February 1948, weeks before Manuel Ponce’s death, he received Mexico’s first National Arts and Sciences Award. His younger colleague Carlos Chávez remarked:

Manuel Ponce’s historic situation in the development of Mexican music is of fundamental significance. He instituted the large forms, with his Trio and Piano Concerto, at the beginning of this century. He is the first great ‘Explorer’ of popular Mexican Art and the initiator of the first frankly nationalist tendency in our country. His work, fertile and uninterrupted, has culminated in creations that, like his Guitar Concerto, have reached universal consecration.

Ponce’s interest in Mexican folk music began early, around the time he composed Estampas nocturnas (Nocturnal Visions). Like Bartók and Kodály in Hungary, Vaughan Williams in England, and Grieg in Norway, he collected folk songs firsthand and provided them with harmonized accompaniments. Some became the basis for piano pieces. As nationalism gained broader appeal, Ponce expanded his output to include chamber music, entering one of his most prolific periods. He also wrote extensively outside nationalist trends, including many songs. Among them, Estrellita, a graceful nocturnal love song, became a favorite of celebrated singers (it still is), later adopted by Heifetz and other instrumentalists as a concert encore.

During a second, extended stay in Europe, Ponce met Andrés Segovia, a friendship that led to many works for guitar. His catalog of some 500 compositions is remarkably diverse. Ponce was also active as a conductor, pianist, administrator, writer, lecturer and critic.

The four-movement Estampas nocturnas originated as a suite of three piano pieces. La noche (The Night) is dark and slow-moving, with chromatic harmonies that build to a radiant midpoint. En tiempos del rey sol (In the Time of the Sun King) evokes a Baroque gavotte, its somewhat heavy tread perhaps reflecting Ponce’s studies in Berlin (1905–07). Arrulladora (Lullaby) is muted yet sonorously scored in eight parts, while Scherzo de Puck references Shakespeare’s mischievous sprite, alternating tripping string figures with playful, yearning phrases.

Ponce’s legacy lies in his synthesis of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, bridging Mexican folk traditions with European forms to create a body of work that remains vital and merits wider investigation. 

— Program notes copyright © 2025 Keith Horner.  Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca