José F. Vázquez (1896-1961)
Impresiones (complete)
Vladimir Curiel (piano)
rec. 2022, Estudio 13, Mexico City
Reviewed as a digital download from a press preview
Toccata Classics TOCC0693 [64]
This Toccata Classics release is a salutary reminder that the hazy twilight of the late 19th century lingered in some parts of Latin America just a little longer than it did beyond 30th parallel north.
José F. Vásquez—the “favourite son of the state of Jalisco,” according to the booklet notes—kept the dissonances, dislocation, and disintegration of the 20th century firmly away from the boundaries that encompassed his art. So untouched by modernism is Vásquez’s music that it is hard to believe that it was created by a man only three years—not three decades—older than Silvestre Revueltas and who lived until 1961. This collection of piano miniatures could be mistaken as a Mexican counterpart to Gabriel Dupont’s Les Heures dolentes. Vásquez was barely over 30 by the time he completed the last of these Impresiones—and, yet, how he brooded!
If the title Impresiones vaguely suggests Debussy, the music itself is the product of an earnest Romanticism that the Frenchman himself had rebuked in his youth. Moments, such as the evocation of a distant tolling of bells in “La oración de la tarde” (Evening Prayer), sound as if Rachmaninoff or Medtner had wandered into a crepuscular zócalo. The world-weary unto death-haunted melancholia of “Barcarola” and “Melodía” which close the first set of Impresiones, for example, are hard to reconcile with being the work of a man still in the bright morning of his life. The “Hoja de álbum” turns from sadness to despair, concluding with a brief flight of a melismatic melody as the coda approaches.
Although Vásquez did not possess the range of the aforementioned latter three composers, he did share with them a penchant for beguiling lyricism, rich chordal writing, and a general doleful mien. Taken as a whole, their textural sameness and utter desolation can be excessive. Heard singly or in handfuls, however, these miniatures are attractive, and would be a welcome encore or swap-out for any played-to-death Romantic warhorse in a recital.
As confidently as Vladimir Curiel plays these Impresiones, one sometimes wished that he would have graced Vásquez’s music with a little more contrast in shading of dynamics and voices. Bernardo Jiménez Casillas contributes the excellent liner notes, which not only gives a listener a firm grasp of this music and its creator, but makes one curious to hear more Vásquez, particularly his orchestral music.
Néstor Castiglione
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