Huapango

Having got so far from the centre of Europe, we might as well carry on westwards, and southwards, to Mexico. In Phileas Fogg’s time, when it took eighty days to get round the world, there was no South American music of any kind in the orchestral repertoire. It wasn’t until the middle of the last century that South American composers - Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alberto Ginastera and Carlos Chávez prominent among them - began to be represented in main-stream orchestral concerts. What European and North American audiences found most exciting about these composers was their use of folk music that had never been exploited before and the new sounds and rhythms that went with it. Moncayo Garcia, a pupil of Carlos Chávez at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, made his reputation with Huapango, an orchestral piece based on the Mexican dance of that name and first performed by the Mexico Symphony Orchestra in 1941. Although he went on to further his studies with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood, nothing he wrote thereafter has proved more successful. Based on dance tunes native to the coast of the Mexican Gulf, Huapango is a highly coloured large-scale blow-up of a dance which is traditionally performed by a violin, a few guitars and, sometimes, two singers mimicking each other’s lines - a characteristic preserved here in the frequent exchanges of material between different instruments in the orchestra.