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Música Criolla: Choral Gems from Argentina is an extremely special delight, a rare South American treat. The Coro Hispano de San Francisco and Conjunto Nuevo Mundo are choral groups operating under the Instituto Pro Música de California (IPMC), a nonprofit organization committed to making music blossom from within the Spanish-speaking communities in the San Francisco Bay area. Founded in 1975, the Coro Hispano is a community group that explores and performs both classical and folk music from all parts of the Hispanic World. Conjunto Nuevo Mundo is a professional ensemble that provides parallel repertory of vocal chamber music and solo literature of Iberian and Latin American composers. Working together, these two groups provide astounding choral music under the direction of Juan Pedro Gaffney R.

Everything about this production is first-class. The album is definitely not your usual holiday offering; instead, this CD offers three principal works: "Misa Criolla" (five tracks totaling 18:25), "Navidad Nuestra" (six tracks totaling 16:33), and "Flor De Chañar" (three tracks totaling 11:12). Only "Navidad Nuestra" is seasonal in nature, and composer Ariel Ramírez brings to life Felix Luna's cycle of poems, a tableau of six scenes that illustrate the Christmas story in Argentine folklore. According to director Gaffney R., this is the drama of Christmas as seen through Third World eyes. The comprehensive liner notes (36 pages, cover to cover!) provide helpful background information in both English and Spanish.

The choral music is largely a cappella with only light accompaniment, including great guitar and percussion. Sung completely in Spanish, the liner notes do describe the stories that unfold. The tone is sometimes joyous, and sometimes somber. The overall tone is more universal than exotic--the music transcends language and cultural barriers. If you love beautiful choral music, then this album will appeal to you.

My favorite pieces here include the opening "Kyrie" (from the "Misa Criolla") and several cuts from Navidad Nuestra, especially "La Peregrinación (huella pampeana)" and "La Huida (vidala tucumana)." The rhythms are hypnotic (the percussion accents are very nice), and the singing clung to my memories long after the album ended.

Música Criolla: Choral Gems from Argentina is for those who embrace Hispanic folk music--and for those adventurous souls who adore great chorale music and are looking for something superbly special for the holidays. Since the music has no hint of traditional Anglo Christmas offerings, this album has limitless replay value all year 'round. Bello!

--Carol Swanson
(Reviewed in 2005)

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From the liner notes:

Coro Hispano de San Francisco & Conjunto Nuevo Mundo, Juan Pedro Gaffney R., director, Juan Pedro Gaffney R., producer, Don Ososke, engineer.

Navidad Nuestra: The Pageant of Christmas as a Morality Play

In the Commercial World, Christmas is a frenzy of buying distributing and consuming that begins the day after Thanksgiving and ends with exhaustion on December 26th. In an older calendar, liturgical in origin but still very much alive in the folk consciousness of the peoples of Iberoamérica, among others, Christmas is seen not as a single event assigned to a single day, but rather a drama involving many scenes and unfolding over many days. These scenes are episodes taken from the infancy narratives of the Gospels, played out in a cycle of feast-days through the twelve days of Christmas and more, for they find their harbinger in the feast of the Annunciation in March, and their real conclusion in Cadelaria at the beginning of February.

Such is the context for Felix Luna's cycle of poems that situate the Christmas story in the homespun of Argentine folklore: a tableau of six scenes, brought to life by music that dances in pair with the poetry. For each scene, Ariel Ramírez selects a specific dance type to capture the affect of the poem.

These tableaux are anything but static; they all tell of journeys, whether spatial or spiritual; an angel flies down from heaven to speak to a village girl; a couple, the wife pregnant, journey to their ancestors' town to be registered in the census, but is night, and there is no lodging available. The third scene, which seems the most at rest, is in fact the eye of the storm: an infant journeys from womb to world, and in the journey brings heaven down to earth. Countryfolk watching over their sheep by night hear voices in the heavens telling them to go search for an infant king, and so they come running to find him, born in a cow-shed. Astrologers journey from far-off lands to find the meaning of the stars in the face of a child. And finally, a family must flee the country in the terror of the night, to escape slaughter at the hands of law-enforcement agents.

This is Christmas depicted not with the sentiments of seasonal greeting cards, but with the poignancy and immediacy that comes from taking the Gospel events seriously, as paradigmatic to the dramas of every-day life. The dialogue between heaven and earth does not open with "Once Upon a Time;" it unfolds Here, and Now.

"Such is the drama of Christmas as seen through Third World eyes: the God that comes down to walk with humankind chooses as walking-mates not the New World Order's most successful citizens, but rather, its least likely: the marginalized, the poor, the oppressed (and shall we not also say the stolen-from?). Nor is it a question of them vs. us; who after all is First World? who is Third? The destitution in our own streets makes clear it is no longer a geographical definition that divides. God's own people are the poor of the earth, but we are all of us capable of such poverty. We have but to let go of our self-invented "first-hood": our attachment to advantage, to power, to privilege, to wealth--not to say plunder. In the beginning, God made only one world; it's we who dig moats and build fences.

This is surely a more sober view of the Christmas story than conventional carol-singing invites; with profound joy, to be sure, but without tinsel, without candy-canes; closer to the daily realities of life, whether in Latin or Anglo America. I got further: I propose that this is n ot simply a possible variant of the telling of Christ's birth, it is the authentic take on the Gospel narratives.

Folkways can fade, and so can religious observances. To the degree that Latin America joins the brave new world fashioned by an unfettered global capitalism, to that degree the tidal wave of commercialization threatens to overwhelm all local traditions with a single culture: a pyramidal structure in which a the bottom produces for the top to consume. But one way the older traditions perdure is by keeping them alive in poetry and in song; and as long as we can sing Navidad Nuestra, the cosmic Christ will continue to be born anew, very local, very contemporary, and very real: God-with-us indeed!"
--JPGR

Coro Hispano de San Francisco & Conjunto Nuevo Mundo

Música Criolla: Choral Gems from Argentina

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