Five Songs

La Barca del marino (Canciones Mexicanas)

Marchita el alma (Canciones Mexicanas)

Lejos de ti

A la orilla de un palmar

Estrellita

If Manuel Ponce is a household name it is probably not so much because of his status as one of the founding fathers of the classical-music tradition in Mexico as because of the world-wide popularity of Estrellita - a song which few Spanish or Spanish-speaking tenors have been able to resist. He is also a hero of the guitar community, whose repertoire he did much to develop in association with his long-standing friend Segovia. As a focused career composer, he conscientiously developed his potential - undertaking a prolonged period of study with Dukas in Paris when he was in his forties - and came through his nationalist and impressionist phases to become one of the leading Latin-American modernists.

The modernist is not much in evidence in his songs. Nor are they all in the popular romantic manner of Estrellita. Many of them, like La Barca del marino and Marchita el alma, are unassuming, conventionally harmonised and melodically attractive folk-song arrangements. Lejos de ti is a more personal piece with sentimental words by the composer himself - written, one likes to think, for his wife, the singer Clema Maurel. A la orilla de un palmar is another folk-song arrangement and, thanks to singers like Amelita Galli-Curci and Tito Schipa, was at one time almost as popular as Estrellita even though it offers nothing like the same opportunity for vocal bravado. Incidentally, unlike those many composers who turn against their early successes, Ponce was so fond of Estrellita that in 1943, as long as thirty years after it was written, he quoted it in the middle movement of his very respectable Violin Concerto.