American Opus (Americascapes 2)

George Walker

George Crumb

Silvestre Revueltas

Sleeve notes in English

This sequel to the Gramophone Award-nominated Americascapes album (ODE 1396-2) by the Basque National Orchestra and Robert Treviño is a thrilling and a deeply personal journey into the music of three American composers. All three composers had very unique aesthetic worlds and with two of the composers conductor Robert Treviño also had direct artistic collaboration. 

Where my first ‘Americascapes’ album looked at lesser-known major American works that had influenced European composers (rather than the other way around), for this follow-up, I went back to a more basic thought – “What is America?”. Since America is many things to millions of people, I realise that my question had to mean, “What is America to me? (…) Selecting the composers for this American Opus took well over a year. Yet I eventually refined the list to these three composers, with all of whom I feel a close kinship and all of whom are deeply meaningful to me. Two of them I even had a direct artistic relationship with. As a group, they also embody some of the diversity and the radically different aesthetics that thrive in the Americas.” (Robert Treviño)

All three works on this album deserve a rightful place among the American Classics. George Walker’s three-movement Address for Orchestra (1959) was the first orchestral work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. It was Walker’s expressed hope that Treviño would one day record this piece. Alongside references to folk music and gospel, Robert Treviño feels that this music also represents well what was America in that particular moment in history: “There is forthrightness, clarity of purpose, directness, and a sense of optimistic belief in America’s future.”

George Crumb was a creative genius and major composer from the American avant-garde school. A Haunted Landscape (1984), written for the New York Philharmonic, is a work with an enigmatic sound world and features 20 percussion instruments alongside the symphony orchestra. Treviño describes: “Crumb’s music is exceptionally difficult to re-create, which I why I think his music has largely been left to the realm of his chamber works. The creative difficulty stems from the fact that he doesn’t use ‘typical’ classical structures like sonatas and so on, nor do his scores visually resemble ‘conventional’ notation styles. Crumb is very much creating through painting complex and subtle soundscapes, including bringing in sounds from other realms into a classical music environment.”

The music of Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940), born in Mexico but living large parts of his life in the United States, has been gaining increased attention during the past decades. The work included in this album was the composer’s last before his pre-mature death and was written for a ballet. “In Revueltas’s music, one flies through a high-octane mixture of so many elements that were pulsing through the Americas – Mariachi, Mexican folk tunes, Native American folk, jazz, television music, cartoons, polytonalism, atonalism, serialism, experimentation, all in this remarkably vivid, technicolor manner. Revueltas is an iconoclastic Americana composer,” Robert Treviño writes.

The Basque National Orchestra is one of the most renowned symphonic ensembles in Spain. Basque National Orchestra is an orchestra that is firmly rooted in its community, has extremely high standards and is strongly committed to symphonic music from all periods. It places special emphasis on the creation and promotion of Basque music worldwide, thanks to numerous international tours and record distribution. Robert Treviño has been its main director since 2017 and, together, they work on progressive artistic improvement and new international positioning, with recent tours in Austria, Germany, Poland and Paris. The orchestra has shared the stage with great conductors such as Lawrence Foster, Yehudi Menuhin, Krzysztof Penderecki, Jesús López Cobos and Juanjo Mena. Also, on the list of soloists are names such as Maria João Pires, Frank Peter Zimmermann, Mischa Maisky, Leonidas Kavakos, Radu Lupu, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Alban Gerhardt, Pinchas Zukerman, Augustin Hadelich, Nikolai Lugansky, amongst many others.

Robert Treviño’s star has risen rapidly among American conductors. The past years have seen his appointments as Music Director of the Basque National Orchestra and Chief Conductor of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. In 2021 The Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai (the RAI National Symphony Orchestra) announced the appointment of Robert Trevino as their new Principal Guest Conductor for the initial period of three years starting in the 2021/22 season. Trevino burst into the international spotlight at the Bolshoi Theater in December 2013, leading a new production of Verdi’s Don Carlo. He was nominated for a Golden Mask award, and one reviewer wrote, “There has not been an American success of this magnitude in Moscow since Van Cliburn.” Recent seasons have seen an ever-growing number of major debuts with orchestras around the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Tonhalle Zurich, San Francisco Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Sao Paulo Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Orchestre Nationale de France, Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin, and Helsinki Philharmonic, among others.