This release is not just another compilation of Latin American piano favorites. Indeed, annotator Luiz Fernando Lopes charges programmers and compilers with using "Latin American" as a "synecdoche," letting a few popular pieces stand in for the whole. Instead, Chilean-American pianist
Pola Baytelman, using a couple of familiar composers (
Villa-Lobos and Ginastera) as bookends, introduces several figures who are largely unknown outside Chile. An attractive feature of
Baytelman's program is that it rejects the boxes of nationalism, popular crossover, and avant-garde, or perhaps that it brings out this blurring of boundaries in the repertories she examines themselves. Modernist Cuban-American composer Ileana Perez Velázquez, even though she treats meter with complete freedom, has a rhythmic vitality in her music that would seem familiar even to the earliest composer on the disc, Chile's Alfonso Leng. Leng, in turn, was shaped by his studies in Germany, and his Doloras: Poemas para piano (1901 and 1913-1914) draws in its highly subjective idiom on the forward strains of European music. These little pieces may be the real find here. They have a deeply melancholy, debilitated quality and are accompanied by written poems designated as acotaciones líricas or lyrical notes; these, and everything else in the booklet, appear in Spanish and English. Another set of early Chilean pieces, the excerpts from the Donc e tonadas de carácter popular chileno of Pedro Humberto Allende, represents a novel transferring of a guitar-and-vocal genre to the piano; they are "songs without words" that go beyond the conventions of folkloric material. The third Chilean on the program, Alfonso Letelier, was active in the third quarter of the twentieth century; his Cuatro piezas, Op. 33, extend and play off of the nationalist and impressionist influences present in Latin American traditions. This is an excellent piece of performance investigation from an artist clearly immersed in the traditions on which she draws, and this is strongly recommended for those interested in Latin American concert music despite indifferent engineering.