Gisele Ben-Dor, English Chamber Orchestra, Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra - Silvestre Revueltas: La Coronela (2010)

The ballet La Coronela (The Lady Colonel) has one of the most frustrating rites of passage for any 20th century work; its progress interrupted by the death of its composer, the work was completed by other hands in time for its premiere on November 23, 1940, in Mexico City. Then that version was lost, and another was raised in the 1950s by José Limantour and Eduardo Hernández Moncada, which pulled in some material from other Revueltas scores to cover for music that could not be retrieved at all. A third version was created by Enrique Arturo Diemecke in the 1990s and this was recorded by him for the Mexican Spartacus label in 2000. This recording by Uruguayan conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor leading the Santa Barbara Symphony was made in 1998 and originally appeared on the Koch label; it makes use of the earlier, Limantour/Hernández Moncada score. As Gisèle Ben-Dor's other recordings, the performance is marvelously exciting, retaining a little roughness that is in keeping with Revueltas' own idiom. The ballet is filled out with a hair-raising account of a lesser-known Revueltas piece, Itinerarios (1938), which mixes heroic gestures with immeasurably sad ones and may be a personal reflection of the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Ben-Dor's recording of Colorines (1932) is still the only one of this relatively early work in which Stravinskïan neo-classic gestures collides with Revueltas' typically noisy brand of nationalism. Those who follow Revueltas closely who may have missed the first issue of this disc on Koch will not want to do so again now that it has a second lease on life; in regard to his lesser-known works, it is essential and includes very strong performances of all three pieces.