Antunez / Shishkina / Zemtsov - Vibraciones de Mexico - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Trash - Trash [COMPACT DISCS] date 07/31/2007

This album features two guitar arrangements of Mexican traditional music, performed by the Aleph Duo, made up of Gustavo Camacho Gomez and Eric Trejo Santiago. Gustavo Camacho Gomez holds a Bachelor in Classical Guitar from the Superior School of Music of the INBA. He is currently studying for his Master's Degree at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg, Austria. He teaches at the State School of Music of Tabasco, and is an undergraduate professor at the State Institute of Culture of the State of Tabasco. Eric Trejo Santiago holds a Bachelor in Classical Guitar from the Superior School of Music of the INBA. He is currently pursuing a master's degree at the Hochschule fur Musik InchHanns EislerInch zBerlin, where he is a beneficiary of the FONCA-CONACYT Scholarship Program for Study Abroad. Along with his classical training, he practices different currents of contemporary music, free jazz, and free improvisation. In 2010, he was part of the free improvisation quintet Synergia Ensemble with which he gave two concerts at the International University Music Festival in Belfort, France.

For this, the fifth instalment of his Shostakovich symphony cycle, John Storgards turns to some of the earliest of the composer's orchestral output, works which Shostakovich largely wrote during his student years. The orchestral scherzo was a favourite task set by composition tutors of the time the relatively simple form still demands that the student produce contrasting material for the outer and central sections, and manage the transitions effectively. Unsurprisingly, the form looms large in the early works of Shostakovich, as well as Stravinsky, Bartok, and many others. The two examples recorded here show the young composer's ability and style, although not yet perhaps a distinct compositional voice. They do both share links with the later First Symphony, however, which was composed as a graduation test in composition from the Petrograd Conservatoire. Shostakovich spent two years working on it, but the Symphony he eventually produced was an instant success, marking him out as a Boy Wonder among Soviet composers. Written four years later, the Third Symphony evidences not only the rapid development of Shostakovich as a composer, but the equally rapid change in the world he inhabited. He passed the newly required examination in Marxist ideology in December 1926, and managed to extend his registration as a postgraduate student at Leningrad Conservatoire until early 1930. He submitted the symphony with the explanation that it 'expresses the festive spirit of peaceful construction'. At this early stage of the first of Stalin's Five-Year Plans, he already demonstrated his realisation that political spin would be crucial to his creative survival.