MUSIC
The Post-Classical Ensemble, conducted by Angel Gil-Ordoñez, below, took a Strathmore audience south of the border.
(Post-classical Ensemble)
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Post-Classical Ensemble
"Planos," by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, "sounds like 300 mariachi bands all playing at once," conductor Angel Gil-Ordoñez said at a concert Thursday by the Post-Classical Ensemble at the Mansion at Strathmore. "Planos" ("Layers") began and ended the evening in smashing performances -- with six more works in between.
The entire program was devoted to music by "Mexican revolutionaries," Gil-Ordoñez said, "who not only worked amid the turmoil of the last century's Mexican revolution, but also revolutionized Mexican music" with a new fusion of indigenous styles and the classical musical language of Paris and Vienna.
These words rang true not only for "Planos" but also for works by Manuel M. Ponce and Carlos Chavez. The ensemble's coursing solos and energetic teamwork nailed down the counterpoint of ideas in "Planos," a virtual battle among sustained dissonances, hammering rhythms and folkish motifs.
Four musicians joined in Revueltas's String Quartet No. 4, keeping the audience focused on their clashing bows and fierce attacks of massed polytonal chords. The foursome also played Chavez's String Quartet No. 1 in a stirring succession of gentle lyricism and suspenseful austerity.
Ponce's grandnephew, Omar Herrera-Arizmendi, played four of the composer's piano pieces, combining introspection with folkish Mexican melodiousness and the ferocious pianistic demands of a Chopin or Liszt.
-- Cecelia Porter
The Outlaws
Ahorde of forty-somethings brought their air guitars to the Birchmere on Thursday for a reunion show of the catchiest and jammingest of the Southern rock bands, the Outlaws.
Three first-generation Outlaws -- singer-guitarists Henry Paul and Hughie Thomasson and drummer Monte Yoho -- are among the seven-piece band on the tour, which was put together to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the band's first LP.
Time hasn't diminished the derivative nature of that record. Soon after he founded Arista in the mid-1970s, industry mogul Clive Davis made the Florida-based act the label's first rock band in hopes of catching the Southern rock wave that Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers were riding. The Outlaws lacked Skynyrd's attitude and the Allmans' aptitude, but they borrowed liberally from both acts.
Paul and Thomasson wrote fabulous pop songs for the Outlaws and showed they can still sing 'em during "Hurry Sundown" and "There Goes Another Love Song." The harmonies on a powerhouse version of the Louvin Brothers nugget "Knoxville Girl" reminded fans that the Outlaws could play country rock as well as anybody in the '70s. But standard pop and traditional country song structures didn't allow for the terminal guitar jams that Southern rock fans demanded.
