CORPUS EVITA

 

José Luis Moscovich and Carlos Franzetti's Exorcism, Corpus Evita

By James Reel

Nearly five years after it was recorded, the San Francisco Camerata's performance of Corpus Evita, the first opera by the striking Argentine composer Carlos Franzetti, is finally being released. The delay had nothing to do with artistic doubts; it's simply that the San Francisco Camerata, like other Bay Area arts organizations, had to regroup financially after the dot-com bust. "We're back to rethinking ourselves since that debacle," says founder and conductor José Luis Moscovich. "The bust had such amazing impacts on everybody in California, even San Francisco Opera had to cancel performances, so what else could we expect for this orchestra playing unknown music and still developing an audience? We had expanded our season and our budget, but this brought us back to square one in many ways."

Moscovich founded the orchestra in 1993 to showcase Latin-American art music of all styles. Significantly, Franzetti's Corpus Evita doesn't sound at all Latin American, at least not in a folkloric way. Franzetti may have won the 2001 Latin Grammy for his album Tango Fatal, but the models of this post-Puccini work are clearly European, although the plot is strictly Argentine. It shows how, in the 1970's, Isabel Perón, after rising to the country's presidency upon the death of her husband, was manipulated by the military into sactioning a repressive right-wing crackdown on dissent, which led to 30,000 civilian deaths--many of them executions carried out in secret. While Isabel dithers, she is offered not particularly useful advice by the ghosts of Perón and his earlier wife, Evita, even more a cult figure in death than she was in life.

As a teenager, Moscovich survived the period relatively unscathed, but he moved to the United States in 1981 (at age 22) to escape the military government and for other reasons. "I had a complicated vocational struggle going on," he says. "I wanted to be a conductor, but I also wanted to be an urban planner. And ultimately, if you analyze it deeply, I also needed to come out as a gay man, and so I wanted to escape in many different ways. So I went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, which is near Pittsburgh, to study urban planning, but I immediately got myself hooked up with the school of music. I am a clarinetist by training, so I got onto the first stand of the symphonic band, even though I had no idea there was such a wonderful repertoire for symphonic band. Then, the first year I was there, Harvey Phillips showed up with his tuba to perform a concerto by some American composer, and I had a total revelation about both American music and band music. Being in the US was an ear-opening experience right from the beginning. Then I went to the University of Illinois at Champaign, and through a series of coincidences I connect with the circle of people that worked with pianist John Wustman, on of the great accompanists of singers. I'd always been a great fan of vocal music, and I'd done some singing myself. That was an incredibly edifying experience." Eventually, Moscovich would work as assistant conductor of the San Francisco Choral Society, and music director of the San Francisco Women's Chorus and San Francisco Jewish Folk Chorus.

"Life and pursuit of a green card brought me to U.C. Berkeley, and I stayed in the Bay Area," he says. "The Bay Area had the most prominent Latin-american population of all the other places I had been to in the United States, but I discoverd that Latin American classical music was a complete mystery to most people there. They could not make a big distinction between Argentina and Cuba or Mexico; Latin America was one big blob. I looked through the program of the San Francisco Symphony, and in the 52 weeks of the concert season I couldn't find a single Latin-American composer listed. So I realized there was truly a niche that needed to be covered, the same was that French music or Russian music had to go through a discovery process with audiences, or the music of Janacek or lesser-known Eastern European composers did before they became accepted. So I got to work on that, and ended up founding the San Francisco Camerata."

Today, the orchestra plays exclusively Latin American music, but it didn't start out that way. "Initially I thought, well, people maybe are more likely to come to a concert to hear a Brahms symphony, but to expand their horizons you program something unknown along with it," says Moscovich. "So I started out mixing Barroque music with string music from Latin America, with a Revueltas piece and so on, and I got a mixed reaction from the audience. After a while, I realized that what I thought was a gentle approach to the subject was actually confusing people; they were commenting favorably on the Pergolesi but not knowing what to do with the Revueltas. So I decided to go for broke and program 100 percent Latin American composers. There were some composers from nationalist periods who drew on Indian music, and you could hear that in their compositions, but we didn't just play nationalistic music. There was also Barroque music from Mexico, and serialist music from Argentina, and Romantic, Rachmaninoff-like music from Ponce in Mexico. The point was that Latin America is a huge world of 500 million people, and it produces as much variety of music as the US or Europe. You just have to find it."

The group has started making it easier to find them through its Latin American Repertoire Discovery Program, an initiative that was interrupted by the financial troubles, but should soon be active again. "There are many wonderful oddities, many of which are in manuscript form," Moscovich points out. "There's a fantastic music collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia, a great number of beautiful pieces from Latin America that have probably never been played; they're just in manuscript. One of my board members deciede that must be the reason these things don't get played. So we began this Latin American Reperoire Discovery series, which simply meant getting an intern form the nearest school of music to input the music into Finale, and then I would edit it into a score, and we could print parts and make it available to people who are in charge of programming orchestral concerts so they would no longer have an excuse not to this this music because they didn't have the parts or the score. We transcribed a couple of dances by Juan Blanco, a Cuban composer who is still alive and in his eighties, and was absolutely thrilled to find out his music was getting played in the United States and that we were making an effort to ensure that his score would survive. That was a stronger effort when we had sponsors and we had more energy to deal with it, but it's coming back little by little, and it's a definite adjunct to the work that the orchestra does. It gets us in touch with other people and begins to fulfill that goal of ours to put ourselves out of business when other orchestras are playing Latin American repertoire the way German and Italian repertoire gets played. I don't see this as an immediate job threat: it will take a while for this to happen.

"One of the problems us that people in Latin America are not aware of a lot of this music, either. There's not a lot of support for it. The traditional thing in Latin America is to listen to European composers, and if you want to get adventuresome, you listen to Bernstein or Copland. You don't get to hear your own music. The local stuff is not undersood or valued much, so if the government doesn't promote it, it's not likely to get out, and there are not many foundations to fund things like this. So if the support doesn't come from the country of origin, and the music isn't typeset, it's extremely hard to imagine how all the stars would align so your symphony can be played by the New York Philharmonic.

"Things are starting to open up with people like Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony looking for the good stuff and playing it. But those people are few and far between. Frankly, my sense is that American orchestras have governing boards that are way too conservative when it comes to adventuresome repertoire, and music directors have a hard time convincing their boards to try something new because they're looking to the bottom line. I say that with respect, because you have to think twice about what will make a season work, and it's less risky to program Rimsky-Korsakov than Juan Carlos Paz. And there aren't as many recordings of that music, so people can't get to know it ahead of time. It's not that obvious that a relatively small group like ours, with an uncertain budget, should be making recordings, but it's important to get this stuff recorded and available so people will get used to it, and maybe in the next decade it will get multiple recordings like a Brahms symphony.

"One of the most interesting things we've done is to commission works. Part of the reason for that was encouraging people either in the United States with a Hispanic heritage or in Latin America to write with the inspiration that contemporary Latin America will give to their lives and their pens, with the sense that whatever they wrote would bear the imprint of the situation they were living in. We commissioner a guitar concerto by Carlos Franzetti, very beautiful and very Latin American, but also it's like American movie music and bridges the two cultures. We put that on a CD (on Klavier, in 1998) with a piece by a native San Franciscan of Hispanic heritage, Manly Romero, who wrote this fantastic piece called Spirals for prepared piano and orchestra. We had a blast recording that. We also played a piece for guitar, marimba and strings by Leo Brouwer, the Cuban composer and conductor, and that was a revelation to me and the audience.

"Then one thing led to another and we got into this Corpus Evita thing, which was more like a fated exorcism than your typical music project, both for Carlos and myself. It was an incredible experience to work through the feelings and issues both of us had lived through during that period. I hadn't written a libretto before, but I have to tell you I have always been fascinated by Verdi's Don Carlos in the French version, and I find the whole notion of being able to make a masterpiece like that work in two languages to be a towering achievement. The marriege of music and words is so extraordinary that I couldn't help taking on the challenge of writing a libretto when it was offered to me. It seemed very forbidding, but I plunged in and Carlos was generous and patient enough to react to my writing and mold his music to it; he even claims he was inspired by it. As I read it now I find it far, far from perfect, but I've always believed it's the music that carries the day. Prima la musica, poi le parole. I did a translation into Spanish, it's not set to music. I have just begun to do that; it's an enormously difficult undertaking to go from a language like English to Spanish. I have come to believe after attempting this translation that Spanish and English come from different planets. But that perhaps explains why we have to market Latin American music so hard, so people will love it.

"Anyway, working on Corpus Evita was really a matter of writing about our own personal rites of passage. I was 13 when Isabel Perón came to power in Argentina; what happened during that period marked me and marked so many people that writing about this stuff is hardly an idle exercise. Like I said, it was an exorcism that took place while we wrote this, as we were coming to grips with things, and coming to grips with the point that some things have no answers or explanations."

So why, for such a personal story, did Moscovich write the libretto in English? "I feel very comfortable in English," he says, "and I didn't write it in Spanish because it wasn't a work that was being written in Latin America. Being here in the United States is part of the whole phenomenon that developed from that period in Argentina. Hundreds of thousands of people have left Argentina, and there are a lot of people who have become disconnected from the reality of the country, now speaking English, French, German...and in a sense I was also writing about the influence that the Peróns and Evita's myth have had on Argentina and its people, and my being in this country is part of that; I am an immigrant as a result of what happened there. I also had this allergic reaction to the thought that people would think this was a sequel to the Andrew Lloyd Webber work, which was a two-dimensional reduction of a very complex story. What was very inspired in this work is that he reduced the situation to a personality cult, which was really what that time was, but a lot of interesting detail was lost. I wanted to go to the essence of the influence that the Perón dynasty had on Argentina, which is still being felt today. I wanted to make sure the complexity of that message didn't get lost in translation, and I didn't want people having to read supertitles to understand it, and I wanted to get the American public to get more involved in this with something more than just a hit song."

Moscovich and Franzetti began with an outline of the story, but Franzetti started writing the music after Moscovich had finished only the first few pages of the libretto. "The peculiarity of this was that I had not written a libretto and Carlos had not written an opera," says Moscovich. "So rather than plunging into the whole thing, we agreed on the detailed outline, and then I put pen to paper, wrote the first two scenes, and he liked them immediately and sent me back some music. I imagined something in my head, but when the music arrived it was completely different, but magically so. Then the process was very quick. I wrote the whole libretto in a couple of installments. Carlos was very clear that he didn't want me to change my approach when I saw the music; he wanted me to be free to put out my own thoughts and he wanted to mold them to music, and he is such a deft, competent composer, he was able to do that and turn it into art.

"Then we spent a good year or so getting it ready for the premiere at the Yerban Buena Center Theater in San Francisco, a modern theater that gave us all sorts of technical possibilities with lighting and stage gimmicks. We did not have a huge budget, but this requires sizeable and good chosrus because it's not easy to learn or sing. I was worried about how we could afford this. I started recruiting people for the chorus, and the response was overwhelming. When they heard pieces of it, everybody wanted to paticipate in it. All these talented singers would come and agree to do an obscene number of rehearsals to get this thing together for very little reward. It was because, as they said to me, they would rather come and perform for me for half what they would get paid to do another Beethoven Ninth. What are the chances of having an out-of-the-body experience doing another Beethoven Ninth? Here was a new flavor to experience. It isn't exactly the same with the public, because the musicians get to the flavor much quicker and the public has a more passive relationship to it. But because of the visiual component, opera can be very compelling and a great hook to bring people in and tear down that wall that people put up against music they don't know. We could play a symphony that's an hour and 20 minutes long and very complex and layered, and the public will have a difficult time digesting that in one sitting. Opera is a better vehicle, as is ballet. We have a great deal of opera and ballet in Latin America that's well worth programming, not just the well known Carlos Chavez stuff, but dances by Lecuona in Cuba and Guarnieri in Brazil-driving rhythms and wonderful music. We've programmed some of that, and music that's very coloristic, to get people hooked. I programmed a piece by Aldemaro Romero, a senator in Venezuela, that's filled with imitations of birdcalls from the Amazonian jungle. This is a fugue with all these birds and syncopations, and people are enthralled by it. So wherever we can find the dance-like component we try to put it in, because it's a great way to get people introduced to new music."

Even though it's taken nearly five years to get Corpus Evita into the bins, Moscovich and the San Francisco Camerata are working on another CD they hope will be available much sooner. "I'm a great fan of the music of Astor Piazzolla," he says. "I was a fan before he became popular, and now people understand his music well, and there are a lot of musicians, not just Argentine musicians, playing it. So we're putting together a program that includes his music and a concerto for violin by Gabriel Senanes-his name is a palindrome-who's a wonderful composer, and a journalist, and an MD, and a very good conductor. He was the artistic director of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires for a couple of years. He wrote a concerto that is one of the most beautiful and atmospheric modern pieces I've heard. He composed it for the guy who played the violin in the Piazzolla quintet, Fernando Suárez Paz, a marvelous musician. So we're working on a recording of that, and we'll have other tango-inspired pieces and some Piazzolla tangos. We're also looking to work with a young bandoneon player named Marcelo Nisinman, who is based in Switzerland now. He's a product of Argentina who is spreading tango awareness throughout Europe. The interesting thing about his music is it's the next generation after Piazzolla; it gets more esoteric. Piazzolla's music has jazz in it and there's a marvelous fusion in it, but this goes well beyond that into something more contemporary. There was a Latin-American composer and music critic named Juan Carlos Paz who had a sharp tongue in writing about the habits of his contemporaries; he complained about "nacionalismo a la Rimsky-Korsakov." That kind of music sounded European and artificial to the local musical language. So now that so many Argentines and Peruvians and Chileans have been in exile, they've created this cross fertilization and picked up sounds everywhere they've lived, New York, Pari, and it all gets processed by people who've had the Latin American experience. It's worth exploring that while these people are alive, and encouraging them to continue progressing and producing new versions of that art."