Its History
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Hidalgo with his banner showing the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1810. |  |
Francisco I. Madero, leader of the Revolution of 1910. |
This piece was started in 2003. It was inspired by the parts of Man, that is, the Body, the Mind and the Spirit, which I wanted to represent musically. This led to the Mind movement being populated by my musical memories, the melodies of my childhood, an interesting combination of Mexican, Jewish and other themes, which led to the name of the new CD, Memories of my Childhood. I finished sketches of it in 2004, including an orchestral sketch of the 1st movement as well as the second and third movement in two piano format. In 2009, the year before Mexico’s 200th Anniversary of its Independence and the 100th anniversary of its Revolution, my First Piano Concerto came out in ERM Media Records, Masterpieces of the New Era, Volume 13, and the owner of the company, Robert Winstin, told me they would record the Second Piano Concerto once it was finished. That put this project in motion again but lacking the resources to finish the work, I undertook a fundraising campaign which lasted 4 years and which took me to Mexico many times, helping me make new friends and reinforcing old bonds of friendship I left behind when I moved to Los Angeles. I am very thankful to those who helped and whose names you can find in a column to the left of this one.
The Piece |
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| Israeli Children Dancing | Mexican Children Dancing |
The 3 movements, The Body, The Mind and The Spirit, have different forms and different musical language. The first movement is somewhat programmatic, taking us from a body that is walking and functioning normally to its nervous system, its synapses, and then to its heart and other various happenings which I will leave to your imagination. It consists of around 10 short sections with different melodies that do not repeat until we get to the sixth section, which has a melody that I liked so much that I repeated twice, which leads to the cadenza (instrumental solo) and a brief recapitulation of the first motive of the piece. The musical idiom of this movement is tonal with dissonant sections. The second movement is subtitled “Memories of my Childhood” and it is a series of interwoven melodies that I noted down as thy were coming into my consciousness. The Spirit follows a traditional sonata form, which means you have two melodies, the first one a playful one, the second one a Bachian one with a development and a recapitulation. The playful melody comes from my notion that the human spirit is intrinsically playful, as we can see in children, and the Bachian melody comes from the grandeur that the works of the human spirit can achieve.
The Recording
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The studio in Bratislava with the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. Kirk Trevor conducting, Ladislav Fanzowitz at the piano.
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The recording of this project took place in Bratislava in February of 2013 (yes, it was cold in the Slovak Republic). The story goes that in 2011, as I was finishing the orchestration of the work, I tried to contact Maestro Winstin and, regrettably found out that he had passed away the year before. So I managed to enlist the services of Maestro Kirk Trevor, the music director of the Miassouri Symphony Orchestra, and in the cold winter of Bratislava, albeit inside a cozy and warm studio which has the biggest studio organ in the world, we recorded the piece in a day. It was an exciting day and I want to thank the soloist, Ladislav Fanzowitz, who gave a great rendition of the piece, to the engineer Hubert Geschwandter, who supervised the recording and after the sessions did the editing with Emil, the producer. Then there was the mastering of the recording, equalizing it with the recording of the 1st Piano Concerto, and the designing and printing of the CD, which image you see below:
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Purchase the physical CD on Amazon.
The Release
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| The release of the CD took place officially in Mexico on March of 2014 with two recitals, one in the Instituto Cultural Mexico-Israel, the Cultural Institute Mexico-Israel, and in Ramat Shalom, a Jewish Community Center, both in Mexico City. these scenes are from the Instituto Cultural Mexico-Israel. The release in Los Angeles will take place soon. | |
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