Music that achieves greatness by dealing with greatness.

ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

Jimmy López Bellido’s mysteriously evocative composition Aurora, here in its world premiere, is a bold three-movement symphonic poem inspired by the Peruvian composer’s experience of seeing Finland’s northern lights during his students days in that country.

The richly-orchestrated score gives the superlative violinist Leticia Moreno a virtuosic turn in a composition created for her and for the ever-enterprising Houston Symphony and its peerless music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada, in a CD now issued by Pentatone.

Ad Astra (Latin for To the Stars), is a five-part composition dedicated to the accomplishments of the people of NASA. The work has evocative titles for each of its movements: Voyager, Apollo, Hubble, Challenger, and Revelation, and in each the composer does not stint on melody and novel harmonies.

Above all, López Bellido has an impressively varied command of orchestration, which he summons in Ad Astra to create effects that often sound as if they came from electronic sources, rather than from the acoustic instruments of the musicians of the Houston Symphony.

Never ever imitative in his work, López Bellido creates a stunning sonic landscape that alternates tutti outbursts from the percussion and brass with delicate filigree work from the strings and surprising twists and turns from the woodwinds, beyond the never exhaustive use of orchestration.

López Bellido’s music is imbued with deep emotional intensity and keen narrative through-line that uses a purely musical language to brilliantly convey the valiant investigations of the universe by humankind, ranging from the pioneering journey into deep space of Voyager through the success of Apollo, to the inquisitive explorations of the Hubble telescope, to Challenger’ tragic explosion, and on to the unknown in Revelation.

In sum, this is music that in an extraordinary performance by the Houston Symphony led by music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada, achieves greatness by dealing with greatness.

Rafael de Acha           

ALL ABOUT THE ARTS  (c/o www.rafaelmusicnotes.com )

Published by ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

Rafael de Acha has enjoyed a distinguished career in the arts as a performer, stage director, producer, and educator. He was born and grew up in Cuba. At the age of 17 he moved to the United States to study Drama at the University of Minnesota, and later Languages at L.A. City College, Music at the Juilliard School of Music, at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music, and at the New England Conservatory of Music, from which he received the Master's degree. He has taught courses on the History of Music at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and at Florida International University, and contributed writings and reviews to Seen and Heard International (www.seenandheard-international.com ) and to this blog. He co-founded the award-winning New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he produced and staged twenty seasons of classical and contemporary theater, including fifty world premieres of plays that went on to have international and national productions on and off Broadway, including Ana in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz (Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2002 and Tony Nomination 2003.) In 2006 he was presented with a citation from The Dade County Cultural Affairs Council for “trailblazing contributions to the arts in South Florida.”