E. B. Marks
María la
O
(Lecuona/Galarraga)
Conductor Score ed.
Evan Hause
Edward B. Marks Music Company, New York
(2013) |

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One of the fundamental barriers to the rehabilitation of
zarzuela cubana has been the lack of decent performing editions. Aside
from material set down from memory by Cuban emigrants to Florida, New York and
elsewhere even E. B. Marks, the New York publishers of the two
most important Cuban zarzuela composers Lecuona and
Roig, have struggled along for half a century with piecemeal
sources of tattered vocal scores (often just of individual songs), libretti of
doubtful provenance plus whatever orchestral material they could find. As for
what may be in the Havana archives … well, to quote from my 2009
zarzuela.net review of Susan
Thomas’s excellent Cuban Zarzuela:
"Revolution, tropical weather and termites have
played their part in the dispersal and destruction of libretti, musical
manuscripts and performing materials. None of these zarzuelas, not even the
celebrated María La O or Cecilia Valdés, have
been published. Some of the most tantalising, such as Roig’s El
Clarín, are unperformable owing to the loss of the libretto.
Others, such as the same composer’s La busca-bulla, lack
music."
It’s therefore with pleasure and relief that I can report
that E. B. Marks’s Publications Director Evan Hause has
been very busy over the last couple of years. First came a decent, newly edited
full score for Cecilia Valdés, which has been used in
performances in Granada and A Coruña – the latter with the
Sinfónica de Galicia, who may have recorded it. Now he has
taken on an even more tricky assignment: the editing of a workable full score
for Lecuona’s María la O. Tricky, because the amount of
contemporary orchestral material available is negligible, whilst memorial
manuscripts, vocal scores and even copies of the libretto pose as many
questions as they solve.
The problems were almost
insuperable, so Hause made the sensible decision to base his work on what we
hear in the well-loved (abridged) recording arranged and conducted by
Félix Guerrero, who had strong links with the composer
and could be expected to know the kind of orchestral palette and counterpoint
he had in mind. The 1990 Artex/EGREM recording from Havana starring
Alina Sánchez was also quarried, though it proved less
useful, rearranging much of the zarzuela generically to suit the taste of its
time, as well as incorporating material from elsewhere in Lecuona’s
output. He also had access to a partially filled-out score in F.
Guerrero’s own handwriting (possibly memorial), Pablo Zinger’s
materials for the 2001 New York production, a tattered and well-nigh illegible
handwritten vocal score, and a crumbling libretto.
Hause was not aiming to produce an academic urtext, even
if such a thing were possible; but a clear, clean and practical working version
with clear tempi and dynamic markings, drawing on the best from those earlier
models to encourage performances around the world. The new edition received its
premiere on March 21st at the Las Palmas Conservatory, and we
may hope this will only be the first of many.
From what I’ve been able
to see of it – a binder of about thirty-five sample pages of the
conductor’s score - the result is extremely useful and attractive, both
for its musicality and the clean, uncluttered look of the engravure. The
orchestration is spot on for a medium-sized zarzuela orchestra, with the
addition of the percussive Batería Cubana of bongos, claves,
maracas, woodblocks and all the rest, which make up that unique, rhythmic
backdrop to so many of Lecuona’s most memorable numbers. As a
percussionist himself, Hause has expended lavishly detailed attention to this
department, and quite right too. Dynamics and tempi look intuitively right. F.
Guerrero has not been followed slavishly, but (to take one example) his use of
solo violin and harp colouration has been utilised and developed to tasteful
effect. Some of Guerrero’s countermelodies in, say, María’s
romanza (and incorporated by Hause) do sound a little
“1950’s” over-romantic: it’s interesting to compare his
work here against the composer’s own, in a 1960 recording with
Maruja González and the Havana Symphony
Orchestra, where string counterpoint is more sparingly used and the
overall orchestral palette is harder and clearer, to my ears closer to
Sorozábal and Weill.
This caveat aside, Evan Hause’s edition is a major cause for
rejoicing. No longer can managements in Spain or the Americas plead “lack
of materials” as a reason for failing to programme María la
O and Cecilia Valdés. Susan Thomas’s complaints, and
our own here on zarzuela.net, have not fallen on deaf ears. E. B.
Marks are to be congratulated on doing a good deed in a naughty world.
© Christopher Webber 2013
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23/III/2013 |