Robert Treviño on American Opus

Expectations were high when the second instalment of Robert Treviño's survey of American music with the Basque National Orchestra landed in the Presto office early last month: the first volume, featuring works by Charles Martin Loeffler, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and Howard Hanson, was one of our Recordings of the Year in 2021, and went on to be shortlisted for a Gramophone Award a few months later.

Happily, we're unanimously agreed that this new triptych of pieces by George Walker, George Crumb and Silvestre Revueltas more than meets the high standards set by its predecessor, and it was a pleasure to speak to Robert recently about his friendship with Walker, his views on the shifting musical landscapes of America, and the kinship which he feels with Revueltas in particular, given their shared heritage...

How did you get to know George Walker, and how did your friendship influence your approach to his music?

I worked with him on the world premiere of the Fourth Sinfonia, Strands, in Cincinnati, and that direct contact was so valuable because it could be difficult to understand what he was going for in his music until you got to know the man himself. When you look at it on the page it seems really straight, and if you take a very objectivist approach it can come off sounding super-angular and dry. 

But once you start thinking in more linear terms and exploring the different textures and colours that can be achieved, it becomes a very different type of music – a bit like Copland, just more modern! He uses a lot of quotations from spirituals in a very subtle way, and when you pick up on that it feels almost Ivesian, but not so overt. It’s really great music.

George’s music has finally started getting the recognition it deserves over the last couple of years, but I certainly remember a time when I had to fight to programme it. That’s great, but it does upset me to see people acting as if he was always considered as a great American composer: I spoke to him a lot when he was alive, and he really struggled to get any of his music played. George personally asked me to record his Address For Orchestra, and finally things have shifted to enable me to do that for a major label - I do hope it gets more live performances on the back of this recording.

How much difference do you hear between the Sinfonias and the more expansive language of the Address?

Not so much: the Sinfonias are perhaps a little bit barer and more efficient, but in general I think the language is similar. But I do think these earlier pieces are less restricted in their proportions than some of his later ones. Especially around the time of Strands, he was often approached with commissions that felt as if the orchestra was just trying to tick a box: ‘We need something contemporary that meets our diversity objectives but keep it short so we can get it out of the way at the beginning of the concert’.  If he was still alive, I’d have asked him to write me an hour-long piece which was the main event: I think he’d have run with that, and we would see his music in a very different way. 

Are you starting to see a more widespread shift in visibility for Black and Indigenous American composers since the Black Lives Matter movement gained impetus in 2020?

Unfortunately not, because I still think it’s a fairly disingenuous movement. I’m sure there are people who are doing this work consciously and doing it well, but I myself still encounter a very subtle undercurrent of racism in the US. Two years ago I had a performance-review for my work with a US orchestra, and one of the administrators told my agent that they were ‘uncomfortable’ with the way I speak about my Mexican-ness because apparently I’m not Mexican enough! I felt like saying ‘What’s the threshold? Do I need to turn up for rehearsals wearing a sombrero?!’ This is an orchestra that presents itself as super-liberal, but when you get behind closed doors it’s a different story... 

I don’t experience that at all in Europe. Even my American-ness doesn’t seem to be a talking-point: I’m just known as a guy who does good Mahler and Brahms and Schoenberg and Beethoven, and is also keen to programme American music. Identity isn’t even an issue. A few years ago I mentored a young Black American conductor who’s now doing extremely well with a European orchestra; he was my assistant at an otherwise nice orchestra in one of the Southern states, but when I heard people referring to him as ‘boy’ I knew they’d never take him seriously there. Maybe things are changing, but my own experiences make me sceptical.  

Did you have any direct contact with George Crumb, the second composer featured on the album?

I couldn’t claim a friendship with Crumb, but I remember attending a lecture he gave in Iowa for students who were working on his pieces. The university employed me as head of the chamber music programme and director of the new music ensemble when I was still an undergraduate because I was always very engaged with contemporary things, and I’d programmed some Crumb as part of that. I remember pulling these huge scores off the shelf and trying to figure out what on earth they were supposed to mean, because a lot of it’s graphic. It’s not like looking at a Beethoven symphony: you have to work out what kind of sound he wanted to communicate with these visuals, which requires a certain level of aesthetic sensibility. 

That’s why I think his orchestral music isn’t played very often – it requires so much preparation-time. A Haunted Landscape was the piece which took the most amount of time to rehearse for this recording, because I had to sit there and talk to the pianist who’s going CLUNK inside the instrument about how we connect that sound with the flutter-tonguing that’s going on in the flute…You need to work out how the sounds meld together, and by modern orchestral rehearsal-standards that’s painstakingly slow.

Aside from being a very difficult piece, it’s seriously creepy! It really conjures up the feeling of walking through an old house with creaky floors and dust everywhere, and put me in mind of watching the original Salem’s Lot when I was a kid. I’ll never forget the scene where the main character’s wife (who’s become a vampire) comes back into the house: he knows he’s going to be destroyed if she touches him, but he’s so overjoyed and grief-stricken that he doesn’t care… 

The funny thing was that Crumb really didn’t have much to say about his music: when he came for that lecture-workshop he’d come out with things like ‘I don’t really remember why I wrote this that way, but it sounds great!’. That told me a lot about him as a composer: he wasn’t somebody like Stockhausen who could give you a mathematical definition of what he meant by ‘mezzo-forte’, he was much more focused on creating atmosphere in sound.

What attracted you to the music of Silvestre Revueltas?

Revultas is a very sad character – he died of alcoholism aged just forty, and this is his final work. (The last couple of pages were orchestrated by a colleague, although you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that). He was a Mexican who studied in Texas and later went up to Chicago, like me; he even spent time in the Roosevelt Building, where I worked. He was a person with an extraordinary, prodigious amount of talent, but at that time nothing for him in the States, so he went back to Mexico and became a very important person there. I’ve managed to break out of that situation myself, but I felt a kinship with his music because I could understand the division.

I believe that as an American you should be very open to the panorama of cultures which co-exist here, and I certainly try to do that myself. But I am Mexican, and that has certain connotations of history, etiquette and sensibilities that are very different to mainstream ‘American’ culture: some of my family (including my father) were very Native American in appearance, for instance keeping their hair long. 

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote very well about the spirit of the Mexican: he talks about how if you scratch away the Judeo-Christian surface imposed by the Spaniards, you find the beating heart of an Aztec who’s going to sacrifice somebody on an altar to the sun-god. He writes a lot about the dark, deep passions which manifest within the society in very different ways. Look at Aztec paintings, for example, or the work of Frida Kahlo, for example: they’re very heavy, robust and morbid in a way. And often you find these things all mixed in with European elements: if you visit the churches set up by the Spanish missionaries, you do see a European aesthetic, but the crucifixes aren’t sanitised: they’re bloody and gruesome, with big nails going through the hands and feet. It’s very much an amalgamation of two opposing cultures. 

And I hear a lot of those contrasts in Revueltas’s music. Intellectually it’s like any other great European composer, but there’s a comfort with extreme colours that you don’t find in the European palette. To use an analogy from cuisine, he doesn’t restrict himself to salt and pepper: his music is full of the sonic equivalent of sharp chillies, exotic herbs and all kinds of spices and sauces. So often he takes what appears to be a prescribed route, but then adds a dash of vivid colour that you don’t expect. I love that sharpness and astringency in his music, and to try and soften the dissonances would be to miss the point completely - it could never be any other way.

I think it’s extraordinary stuff: it’s colourful, vivacious and surprising every time, and in a way I find it akin to cartoon music (although it predates all of that). I do hope this recording encourages orchestras to programme him a bit more: by and large it’s restricted to the Latin music nights at the moment, and the only piece that gets out regularly for those is Sensemayá. That’s a phenomenal piece, but there are plenty more!

Are there more Americascapes albums in the works, and if so then which composers might feature? 

I could do ten more of these discs if there was an appetite for it! Claude Vivier would be at the top of my list, because I’ve been a huge fan of his music for twenty years but it’s very difficult to programme. And I would bring Elliott Carter back: it might seem like he doesn’t need the help, but nobody’s really playing his music anymore because it’s so damn hard! His two champions were Daniel Barenboim, who’s not conducting much these days, and the late James Levine (and we all know the story there). Daniel’s son Michael is flying the flag, because we were both exposed to that high period of creativity in Chicago when Daniel was Music Director, and Boulez and Haitink were popping in and out all the time. I worked with them all, so musicians of our generation who are from that camp really get Carter. 

Augusta Read Thomas is another composer I’m thinking about, as is Shulamit Ran and the young Chinese-American composer Zhou Tian. Looking backwards, Walter Piston, William Schuman and Vincent Persichetti have been almost forgotten, and there hasn’t been an interesting recording of Samuel Barber’s symphonies for a while. And the Czech-American Karel Husa is on my list - specifically his music for 1940, the year that the Soviets invaded the Czech Republic.

Naxos covered a lot of the ground for those older composers, but they often recorded in a very tight time-frame. No disrespect to the people who did that work, but if you really want to make the case for this music you’ve got to invest in it and build in time to rehearse properly and let it breathe - otherwise it’s a bit like reading out Shakespeare a line at a time. I’m really happy that Ondine has allowed me the space to do it justice.