As the titles of two of the present works indicate, Revueltas immersed himself in the traditions of the Maya Indians (renowned for their pre-Aztec architecture in Yucatan), whose descendants are still to be found in various parts of Central America. He evoked them by folk-influenced rhythms and melodic turns of phrase (though without any actual quotations), often presented in a faux-naif style that parallels the murals of his slightly older contemporary Diego Rivera. Another strong musical influence was Stravinsky, to whom his debt is clear both in the Sacre-like cumulative tension of repetitive patterns in Sensemaya and in the brittle textures and wry dance character of the fantastically-scored First Little Serious Piece, reminiscent of L’histoire du soldat. This miniature is one of four items played by a chamber group from the Los Angeles Philharmonic: the first section of the light-hearted folksy octet Ocho por radio is a little scurried, but the group is excellent, and recorded with exemplary clarity, in the Homage to Lorca (written while the poet was still alive): the ‘wrong-note’ parallel lines of the cheerful first movement are a bit formulaic but it has zest, the slow movement unfurls over a hypnotic piano ostinato, and the finale is deliriously busy.
Of the three works for the full orchestra, by far the most impressive though not the best known is the suite drawn from the film La noche de los Mayas: after a lament in the middle of the first movement’s primitivism come a sparkling scherzo, a lyrical Nocturne (perhaps Revueltas’s loveliest creation) and an orgiastic finale where the percussion and brass have a field-day. The early Ventanas (‘windows’ on what, I ask?) somewhat bewilderingly alternate violent frenzy and a mystical, sinuous calm voiced by a solo oboe. Two different approaches have been experienced on disc to the now familiar Sensemaya: fast, with much extrovert excitement, as with Batiz, or deliberate and menacing, as with Mata. Salonen stresses the insistent ostinatos (chanted Indian words in Revueltas’s original setting) but takes it so slowly – making it a third as long again as Batiz – that it merely plods. Perhaps it is that though Los Angeles is not that far from Mexico, very distant culturally as well as geographically is Finland, where ritual snake-killing is not an indigenous activity.'