PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Evencio Castellanos Born May 3, 1915, Cúa, Venezuela. Died March 20, 1984, Caracas, Venezuela.

Santa Cruz de Pacairigua, Suite Sinfónica

Castellanos composed Santa Cruz de Pacairigua in 1954. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, snare drum, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, bells, glockenspiel, xylophone, harp, piano, celesta, and strings. Performance time is approximately sixteen minutes.

Like Armando Reverón, the painter who is currently being celebrated with an unprecedented retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Evencio Castellanos is little known outside his native Venezuela.

MoMA describes Reverón as “an artist unlike any other” ever exhibited there (this is the first major exhibition of his work organized by a North American museum)—a painter who sought to establish a specifically Venezuelan modernism and who was just beginning to be celebrated in Venezuela at the time of his death. Castellanos, who is almost completely unfamiliar on concert programs in our country, also played a role in Venezuelan modernism.

Castellanos was born in the town of Cúa, where he learned to play the organ and the harmonium from his father, who was organist at the local chapel. He then moved to nearby Caracas to study piano, and in 1931 he became the organist of the cathedral there. In Caracas, he was a composition student of Vicente Emilio Sojo, who is regarded as one of the founding members of modern Venezuelan music. Sojo almost single-handedly renewed musical life in Caracas, a city with a vibrant musical tradition dating back at least to the sixteenth century. Sojo helped to establish the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra in 1930 and was its chief conductor for nearly two decades. Castellanos himself would eventually conduct that orchestra, along with a number of the twentieth century’s most famous conductors and , including Wilhelm Furtwängler, Sergiu Celibidache, Walter Klemperer, (whose name, according to the composer’s amanuensis Robert Craft, came out sounding like “Travithky” in the local accent), and (who conducted Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony there for the only time in his career when parts for a Bartók score didn’t arrive).

In 1945, when Castellanos graduated from the Escuela Superior de Música, which Sojo directed, he played his own Piano Concerto, his first work with strong nationalistic tendencies. But like Reverón, who went to Spain and to to further his studies as a painter, Castellanos wanted to expand his horizons beyond Venezuela’s burgeoning new cultural nationalism, and so in the mid-1940s, he moved to New York City, where he enrolled at the Dalcroze School of Music. But it was his return to Caracas in 1949 that launched his most productive period as a composer. While Reverón was content to live out his days painting in a palm-frond hut in the fishing village of Macuto on the Caribbean coast, far from the whirl of the modern art world, Castellanos remained at the heart of Venezuela’s music life and then moved to Paris in the early 1970s, where he gave organ recitals at Notre Dame. When he returned to Caracas shortly before his death, he was revered at home, but he was still little known elsewhere.

Like the music by his teacher Sojo, Castellanos’s work is rooted in Venezuelan folklore and native musical tradition. He won the National Prize for Music in 1954 for Santa Cruz de Pacairigua (Holy Cross of Pacairigua), named after a small church near Caracas that celebrates an annual Feast of the Cross. A symphonic suite in three connected sections, the work combines colorful folk tunes, dazzling rhythms (the percussion section is kept particularly busy), and even threads of Gregorian chant in the final section depicting the religious celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to change without notice.

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