Evocación Tropical-Sonata No.2, Op.21
Tropical jungle in Veracruz
The first movement of Tropical Evocation, Op. 21 presented itself on a day when García de León had gone with his buddy the singer David Haro to a place in Veracruz by the Coatzacoalcos river to cut bamboo. When the composer returned home thinking about everything he had seen, smelled and heard in the jungle, the musical themes came to him. Measures 1–17 evoke the tumult of sounds from the birds and animals—chaotic, energetic, and all at the same time—and therefore there are multiple rhytmic and tonal planes. The composer says the music “...comes from a moment of clear evocation—hence its name—in an environment where the aromas, the colors, the breeze, and the murmur of the river come together and bring to mind ancestral memories, experiences of the faraway days of my childhood; recalling the games, places, beliefs, desires, and the freedom of life in the tropical coast.”
In the second movement, improvisatory sections evoking tropical breezes alternate with a languorous, sweet, lyrical, and free exploration of the rumba rhythm that in the first movement is energetic.
Pedro Haley performs “Costa y Selva.”
The lively last movement, “Costa y Selva”, features the typical 3/4 against 6/8 rhythm of the Veracruz son. For the composer, this movement is “full of nostalgia and melancholy, driven by an instrumental virtuosity that suffuses the work with a certain optimism and hope.”
Although the Tropical Evocation is dedicated to the composer’s friend the guitarist Jaime Márquez, it was premiered by the composer himself January 19, 1987 in the National Fine Arts Institute’s festival “The Guitar Today.”
“All my work comes out of an effort to express and to evoke the fantasies, nostalgia and memories of childhood, the special and hallucinating melancholy of the sultry jungle atmosphere, the noises and aromas of the salt marsh, the balmy breezes making murmuring labyrinths in corridors of high arches, sound of palms, trains and bells, and imaginary and far away rumbas.” Ernesto García de León
***************
Editor's Note: Notes taken from Ernesto García de León, Collected Works, Volume 3 by Michael Lorimer, ed. Used by permission © 2010 by Adela Publishing (ASCAP).