…highly recommended to anyone…

To read the complete review, please visit American Record Guide online.

Naxos’s priceless Latin-American Classics series spawned a triumph with this disc of orchestral works by Mexican composing giant Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940). Revueltas was a musical genius who went to extremes of both vision and alcoholism, and produced a powerful and singular body of work that seems to have swallowed Stravinsky whole, digested it along with all of Mexican folk music, and thrown in some personal demons. Revueltas’s well-known Sensemayá is a dark, epic work of extraordinary orchestral color and taut suspense. Less often heard but no less potent are his film score for La Noche de los Mayas and the ballet La Coronella, both heard here in arrangements by other composers. The latter is a distillation of Revueltas’s music for the revolution-themed films Vámonos con Pancho Villa! and Los de Abajo. The percussion and brass-led finale of Mayas is some of the most brilliant orchestral writing of the 20th century…