William Cepeda’s Bomba Sinfónica consists of an overture and 13 movements divided into four suites for orchestra, chorus, and soloists, including Bomba drums and other Latin percussion from the composer’s native Puerto Rico. The vocal forces also include both operatic and popular singers. Stylistically, Cepeda creates a very enjoyable and to my ears successful fusion of ethnic and “classical” elements. Most of the movements employ the vocal forces in some combination, and the range of moods is appropriately wide. The texts, which are paraphrased in English in the accompanying booklet, were assembled by the composer from a variety of sources (including some original verse written especially for the piece) and speak of the beauty of his native Loiza, his cultural heritage, and the usual assortment of life’s sorrows and joys. Cepeda’s orchestration is effective, and often quite striking. I’m thinking here, for example, of touches of color such as the entrance of the harp in the first movement of the “New World Suite” (the second in the series of four). There are also some striking melodic similarities to the music of Portuguese composer Joly Braga Santos (his ballet Crossroads, or the Divertimento No. 1).
The performance here gives a good sense of what the music is and how it operates, but it has some major flaws. The chorus only has eight voices, and whether the composer intended it or not the vocal blend and the balance with the orchestra sounds skewed. The solo voices also are placed way out in front of everyone else in a very resonant acoustic, making it impossible to find a volume level that’s tolerable. What works when the orchestra plays alone becomes painful when the voices enter. This is a pity, because tenor Carlos Aponte (in particular) has an impressively bright timbre when it’s not blasting in your ear. I also suspect that there’s more to the music’s underlying rhythmic foundation than comes through the comparatively diffuse instrumental sonority. It’s too bad, really, because I would very much like to recommend this work to general listeners. It’s fun, colorful, and full of soul, and I’m somewhat shocked that the performance could not have been more successfully engineered.
