Roberto Sierra has taken a lot of guff for his exploitation of Puerto Rican and Latino popular music idioms in “classical” concert music. After all, the fashion for such things dates back to the 1920s, starting with Gershwin and Villa-Lobos and continuing with Copland, Bernstein, Chavez, Revueltas, Ginastera, Orbón, and numerous others, never mind the Spanish composers who started it all. Sierra is, basically, a romantic nationalist, and there’s nothing wrong with that. As time goes on his lack of obvious originality will fade and the music will be judged on its own merits.
In the meantime, we have on this disc three highly entertaining orchestral works saturated with Latin rhythms and melodic motives. The Symphony No. 3 actually casts a wider net than just “Salsa.” It contains an exotic Habanera, and a scherzo labeled simply “Danzas.” It’s lots of fun, colorful and never dull. Borikén is a chaconne, which is basically the same thing as a passacaglia, which was a Spanish dance to begin with, while the title of El Baile (“The Dance”) speaks for itself. The performances, featuring Sierra’s home town team under the capable baton of Maximiamo Valdés, do the music proud, and the engineering is vivid.
Now for the bad news: Sierra’s song cycle Beyond the Silence of Sorrow, to poems by N. Scott Momaday, is let down by several factors, not the least of which is the singing of soprano Martha Guth. Her voice is notably unattractive in timbre, her diction incomprehensible (this is supposed to be English), and Sierra’s settings are mostly droopy and melodically uninspired. Indeed, his vocal writing is remarkably ungainly, with awkward leaps and an excessive reliance on the soprano’s (harsh) upper register, which only makes Guth’s already iffy enunciation even more problematic. Ignore it and enjoy the orchestral pieces.
