During the past few years several recordings of Mexican music conducted by Enrique Batiz have appeared, including the Sinfonia india by Chavez and various orchestral pieces by Revueltas. In this further instalment, all the music is refreshingly direct and unpretentious, with performances to match.
In the three works by Revueltas, all written in the 1930s and reflecting his skills as a theatre and film composer, there may be a tendency to go on for too long—in Caminos, especially. But an almost Ivesian swagger counters any tendencies to Hollywood exoticism: and, as the end of Musica para charlar (''Music for chatter'') shows, Revueltas's punchy sense of humour doesn't prevent him from generating powerful climaxes out of attractive melodic material. The earliest piece, Ventanas, is the most serious in tone, evoking either a battle or a particularly bumpy train ride, and the fact that one hears an almost direct quote from The Rite of Spring towards the end shows that there is much more to Revueltas's style than folky post-impressiomism. There is a far greater range of style in the two works by Carlos Chavez, written 20 years apart and with the kind of symphonic ambitions one imagines Revueltas would have scorned. Sinfonia de Antigona (1933) offers an unusual mixture of austere and lyrical music, and the sheer idiosyncracy of the piece is striking, but it is let down by an attempt at faster music in modal style. Copland would eventually be much better at this kind of thing. The Symphony No. 4 (1953) is much more conservative, and I found the easy-going first movement dull. The other two are much more interesting: a Molto lento with a strong sense of line, and a genial, expansive finale with a raucously affirmative ending. The performances have panache, the sound is variable, some of the bigger climaxes lack definition. But this is undoubtedly a disc to sample.'