great music never dies

Posted on Thursday, October 28

Even on the Day of the Dead, great music never dies
By Elias Cepeda
Photos © Karthik Sudhir

For Arte Y Vida Chicago.com

“Number one, you’ve got to be ready,” Hector Guzman says.

Guzman is a symphony orchestra conductor, a Maestro. Before that he was a celebrated pianist and competitive concert organist.

Like many successful Maestros, Guzman is in demand as a traveling guest conductor. Guzman is Music Director of the Plano Symphony Orchestra and the Irving Symphony and the San Angelo Symphony, all in Texas, and has guest-conducted all around the globe. On October 30 Guzman will be in Chicago conducting the Chicago Sinfonietta to open their 2010-2011 season with a Day of the Dead holiday concert at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.

Being a guest-conductor is an honor and indicative of being held in high-esteem in the music world, but it can also be an immense challenge. At home, a conductor has the respect of and familiarity with his orchestra, but on the road he or she finds themselves in the spotlight telling a bunch of strangers what to do on stage.

If a conductor does not come correct, the professional musicians they have been brought in to conduct will immediately recognize it, and the relationship and performance will suffer. “They can judge immediately by the very way you stand on the podium that you know what you are doing or not,” Guzman says.

Luckily for him, the prodigious musical talent has been conducting orchestras since he was seventeen years old and has become a pro’s pro over the ensuing decades. The Chicago Sinfonietta will also make Guzman’s job just a little bit easier in that regard. “When you have this caliber of an orchestra, it is always a pleasure. When you have lesser orchestra, it can be a challenge,” he says with a laugh.

The Chicago Sinfonietta’s opening concert may be the first holiday concert of the season, a distinction earned by paying homage to Mexican culture. In Mexico, and across the world for those of Mexican descent, Day of the Dead is a day when people remember and commemorate loved ones that have died.

Rather than being a sad occasion, Day of the Dead can often be a real celebration – of the lives of those who are now gone – which mocks death’s grip. The Chicago Sinfonietta’s holiday concert picks up on that jubilant spirit as a theme. Not all of the pieces performed will be explicitly about Day of the Dead, and not all of them are even Mexican pieces.

But they are all celebratory, which Guzman believes is the real point of the holiday. “The day of the dead in Mexico is not a sad . It is a very happy celebration so we wanted to include happy music,” he says.

The concert’s program will include Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, which is inspired by a short story by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, and Maurice Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess. Guzman and the Chicago Sinfonietta will be joined by Spanish Pianist Joaquin Achucarro, who will be performing Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain.

To make sure the performances will be sharp, Guzman, the Sinfonietta and Achucarro will rehearse together for about three hours each on Thursday, Friday and Saturday of this week.

It is like going from 0-60 miles per hour – a conductor and an orchestra relatively unacquainted with one another, suddenly spending hours on end together and then expecting to produce a flawless performance just days later – and both Guzman and the Sinfonietta need each other to be high-end sports cars to get it done. “Nothing about this music is easy,” Guzman says. “It takes a lifetime. In fact, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done a piece. It doesn’t matter because the next time you do it you discover new things that you didn’t notice before.”

Guzman recounts an old story of a famous composer who was asked during an interview how many times he had conducted the 9th Symphony. The conductor stated that it had to have been well over a hundred times. Asked, then, if he knew the piece he replied, “Oh no, I’ve just started to learn the piece.”

“The point is that even for great conductors, this music is so wonderful that the more you know it, the more you realize that you don’t really know it, that you are just scratching the surface,” Guzman says.

It is the music that connects conductor to orchestra and Guzman’s own connection to this type of music spans several lifetimes. Growing up in the mining state of Zacatecas, Mexico, Guzman learned an appreciation for music from his miner/musician father. At a time when American companies owned many of the mines in Zacatecas, they routinely brought in musicians from California, helping make the state and Guzman’s town in particular, a very musical place.

Once it became clear that he and his siblings were musically talented, Guzman’s father moved them to Mexico City because he wanted them to be in a place that would afford them the proper training and exposure. Guzman followed his father’s dedication with his own and went on to become an award and international competition-winning organist and conductor.

Guzman is aware that his concert will be competing with all sorts of available modern
Halloween/Saturday night diversions for the attention of hip Chicagoans, but is confident in the product of his field. For one, there is the depth of the music – unending and never completely knowable – and then there is the flip side to its history. It may be old, but if we don’t know our roots, we can’t know ourselves.

“I’ve heard the criticism, ‘oh this music was written many years ago and the composers are dead,’” Guzman chuckles. “But their music isn’t dead. Great music never dies. There is always something wonderful about it. When it comes to our music, Mexican music, it is even more so because this music is your roots, your family, your country.”