‘Requiem’ wrestles with history
Conquest of Latin America gets almost operatic telling
The question of multiculturalism in symphonic music has yet to produce a satisfying answer in modern times. With a Western convention so indebted to Bach, acknowledgement of non-Western traditions often fails to rise above easy categorization, like an all-Latino composer concert, or Bartokian flourish.
The most well-known recent attempt to bridge this cultural gap has been Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, a musical collective that is nearly diverse to a fault. Yet each musician in Ma’s worldly ensemble has a distinct attitude about multiculturalism.
One such member is the composer Gabriela Lena Frank, who finished out a threeyear composer residency at the Houston Symphony this weekend with the premiere of her new piece, “Conquest Requiem.”
Look at the first and second half of Houston Symphony’s weekend program, titled “Shostakovich 5,” and you would have noticed the wry interplay between two distinct artistic sensibilities. Closing the night was the Soviet composer’s muscular and transparent fifth symphony, a four-movement journey with Tinker Bell-esque sojourns with flute and harp, but grounded by pounding, repetitive motifs from the strings.
On the other hand, the opening act was the premiere of Frank’s subdued mourning of a history lost. The symphony opened with a question mark — how do we reclaim from our culture, and art, from our colonizers? — but ended with an exclamation: Here’s Shostakovich!
Symphonies often indulge in concerts with all Latin-American composers, or nods to composers whose music pays tribute to folk traditions. But Frank’s “Conquest Symphony,” with a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz, took Latin American culture beyond a mere theme or niche. It was, if not political, grounded in the belief that history must be wrestled with.
A Shostakovich program does no such a thing — it revels in tradition. The symphony, for that matter, did that superbly, with musical director Andrés Orozco-Estrada again stretching the orchestra during moments of both murmuring elegance and gung-ho gravitas.
“Conquest Requiem,” a requiem not for a man or woman but an entire culture of native peoples in Latin America, was nearly operatic in its expression of the complex historical figure La Malinche.
Malinche was a Nahua woman who both betrayed and perhaps saved her people by courting Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and gave birth to Martin Cortes and thus to a new Mestizo heritage. Though some see Malinche as a mother to the Mexican people, her name is often associated with disloyalty.
The premise for Frank’s requiem raises the question of assimilation: How much should you revere Europe? Do you embrace its history as your own, or do you reject it as a recourse for the cultural erasure caused by colonialism? Orozco-Estrada brought Frank out on the podium on Friday night to find out. “I can spend all night asking you about this requiem,” he said, after a brief exchange about Malinche and what her story means today.
Cruz’s text, written in Spanish, though, isn’t overt about such discussions, but rather grounded in the personal woes of motherhood and loss. The piece cloaks its musical parentage with ambiguity — or you could say multiculturalism — invoking Chinese and East Asian sensibilities, vocal enunciations such as whoops and hollers and European symphonic music alike.
And when it comes to requiems, Frank owes more to Benjamin Britton and his “War Requiem,” a commentary on World War I, than Mozart or Verdi.
Frank, daughter to a mother of Chinese and Peruvian descent and a European father, noted she is the product of European conquest, which she called the “greatest and most cataclysmic event in history.” Her requiem did not choose the path of catastrophe, as Verdi did with his Requiem’s “Dies Irae.” Partway through her composition, the mood shifts from tension to calm reflection. The dead, silent in their graves but also silenced by history, are eluded to with strings playing resolved chords.
Though, those chords weren’t simply nostalgic. They hinted at irony. It was as if the dead demanded even more from the living — more acknowledgement, more story, more revision of a history untold. Though the symphony’s concert concludes with such roaring Russian triumph as to erase all memory of any pre-intermission entertainment, Malinche, her words sung with a sense of harrowing loss by Jessica Rivera and backed by the outstanding Houston Symphony Chorus, left us with a final message: “Remember me.”