The Piano Works of Aurelio de la Vega (review)

Charles Darwin once wrote, "music was known and understood before words were spoken." The naturalist's observation comes to mind when listening to Aurelio de la Vega's complete oeuvre for piano, recently recorded by Cuban pianist Martha Marchena. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1925, de la Vega is currently Distinguished Emeritus Professor of California State University, Northridge where he taught composition from 1959–92. His protean output encompasses a vast range of compelling orchestral, chamber, and vocal and electronic scores, yet it is through his ten piano works—composed between 1944 and 1987 and collected for the first time on this recording—that de la Vega has most often marked the shifts in his compositional career.

As Marchena's definitive account reveals, de la Vega's piano catalog may be compact—the entire recital clocks in at little more than forty-two minutes—but it uniformly consists of milestones. Taken together, as they are here, these pieces serve as a remarkably integrated and cogent summary of the composer's eclectic traversal of twentieth-century classical music, from his earliest idiosyncratic probing of mainstream styles to ever more adventurous and consistently individualistic explorations of serialism, aleatory, graphic notation, chromaticism, pantonality, and Cuban rhythms.

Yet, notwithstanding the creative crosscurrents flowing through de la Vega's keyboard output, his opus transcends styles and trends. De la Vega's works always sound like him, regardless of the array of devices and influences that have informed his musical development. A unique and distinctive artistic vision is at the core of this recording, with expressiveness of the highest order as the raison d'être of each composition, no matter the genre or period.

For his part, de la Vega—who is also a noted essayist on Latin American visual arts—described his body of keyboard work in 2001 to Los Angeles Times critic John Henken as a "kind of a canvas of 50 years of music." The multihued artwork that emerges from that half-century of pianistic writing vividly illustrates de la Vega's expertise in creating scores that challenge intellectually, yet also communicate in gripping visceral and sensual terms. To a far greater degree than much other Western contemporary classical music, de la Vega's oeuvre engages the mind and also connects on a primal emotional level. Even though formal analysis of these piano pieces can only deepen appreciation of them, they also resonate simply as sonic experiences, underscoring Darwin's assertion about the fundamental role music has played in our evolution and existence.

To put it in modern terms, human beings are hard wired for music, and any musical work must primarily be evaluated on how it actually sounds. That is not to devalue notation and the essential role it has played in the development of Western music since the eighth century, nor to disregard the vital ways in which musicology has deepened the understanding of composition. Rather, whatever symbols, instructions, or blueprints composers use for the written transmittal of their musical thoughts to performers, the interpretation of those marks on the page ultimately determines—assuming a modicum of interpretive skill—how the vast majority of listeners assess and react to a musical work.

In that respect, Marchena's recording of de la Vega's piano works is an amazing achievement, especially given the formidable technical challenges posed by much of de la Vega's keyboard writing. Throughout this recital, Marchena displays a rarely heard blend of interpretive artistry and sheer virtuosity that reveals the singular poetry, passion, wit, and vigorous intellect at play in de la Vega's creations, and makes a convincing case for considering his piano output an essential entry in the canon of Western classical music.

De la Vega is a pianist himself and throughout these pieces he fully explores, in scores that are a model of instrumental lucidity, the piano's expressive and sonic range. Even the thorniest runs...