Pan American Symphony's Mexican Music Festival 

The Pan American Symphony Orchestra, a community orchestra that plays at a professional level, has made for itself a small but solid place in Washington's musical life, specializing in music of Latin America. This is a growth field, not only because the local Hispanic population is expanding but because the musical life of our southern neighbors has a depth and richness that we have hardly begun to grasp.

Saturday evening at the Lisner Auditorium, the PASO and conductor Sergio Alessandro Buslje launched the musical portion of a festival titled "Mexican Journeys 2002" with a program of orchestral works by Mexican composers, plus the "Concierto Andaluz" of Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo. Two of the composers on the program, Jose Elizondo and Arturo Marquez, were present to accept the warm applause for the world premieres of works commissioned by the PASO. The orchestra not only played with impressive skill but clearly enjoyed itself at a level seldom seen in professional orchestras.

Marquez played the piano in the premiere of his bright, folk-flavored Danzon No. 7 and in his Danzon No. 2, which was heard as an encore. Mexican folklore is also a primary element in Elizondo's music. "La Leyenda del Quetzal y la Serpiente," which had its premiere, was inspired by an Aztec myth.

Rodrigo's concerto, for four guitars and orchestra, using Andalusian folk motifs, was the centerpiece of the program and its most substantial work. The Aurora Guitar Quartet, a young and very proficient ensemble, made its first appearance with an orchestra in this work. Its four members, hailing from Japan, Cuba and Columbia, Md., play together with an intuitive coordination. Buslje effectively handled the tricky challenge of balancing four guitars with a large orchestra.

-- Joseph McLellan

CLASSICAL MUSIC

March 19, 2001; Page C4
Section: Style

The music of Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, creator of the New Tango style, has recently attracted so much attention that musicologists held a symposium on his work last year at the City University of New York. After years of indifferent public response to his compositions, Piazzolla, who died in 1992, suddenly became front-page news for New York's Latin aficionados. On Friday, a musical ensemble drawn largely from Washington's Pan American Symphony Orchestra brought Piazzolla's "Maria de Buenos Aires" to the Lisner Auditorium stage.

A compromise between grand and light opera, Piazzolla's "operita" expands the tango genre to theatrical dimensions with a surreal plot intermingling sociological commentary, symbolic allusions to Catholic liturgy, and lust.

Argentina's song-dance tango evolved from Andalusian, African, and Cuban rhythms and melodies, implanted in the urban slums of Buenos Aires in the late 1800s. Though in his operita Piazzolla adds elements of classical music and jazz to tango, his "new" version seems more reminiscent of familiar musical idioms ranging from Parisian cabaret, Kurt Weill, Looney Tunes and Xavier Cugat.

Conductor Sergio A. Buslje whipped up an energetic performance, with first-rate soloists. The most dazzling contributions came from Raul Jaurena on the bandoneon (accordion) and pianist Jeffrey Watson.

Pan American Symphony Orchestra

Adams Morgan was the scene of some enjoyable music making at the Mexican Cultural Institute Saturday. "Mexico Sinfonico," a concert by the Pan American Symphony Orchestra and the 13th Street Saxophone Quartet, featured the music of Mexican composers Jose Pablo Moncayo and Arturo Marquez, and the Argentine Astor Piazzolla. Founded and conducted by Sergio Alessandro Buslje, PASO is a community-based chamber orchestra that has enlivened Washington's music scene for more than a decade. Its projects include inviting talented local high school students to join in its concerts.

Saturday's performance was as refreshing as traditional events performed outdoors on a Sunday afternoon at the town bandstand. Buslje goes at it with an energy and enthusiasm that maneuvers this group over rough technical hurdles and is met with some sturdy, responsive playing.

The rather high-decibel evening began with three samples of Piazzolla's signature crossovers mixing the rhythmic asymmetries of Latin dance with classical influences. The orchestra handled the dance styles with no-nonsense vigor, though it still needed some warm-up time. For Moncayo's Sinfonietta, Buslje managed to highlight its Coplandesque fresh-air sound while underlining the piece's basic rhythmic pulses forged from Hispanic and indigenous Mexican folk music. Marquez's Danzon No. 8 was performed with equal success.

The saxophones added a generous measure of the cool and catchy, most effectively in Marquez's Danzon No. 5.

-- Cecelia Porter

PERFORMING ARTS

Column: PERFORMING ARTS
November 2, 1998; Page E7

Pan American Symphony Orchestra's

`Todo Tango' at Lisner Auditorium

Sergio Alessandro Buslje, artistic director and conductor of the Pan American Symphony Orchestra, has quietly created a valuable Washington institution. His amateur orchestra, which showcases Latin American classical music, demonstrated this with its tribute to tango Friday night at Lisner Auditorium. "Todo Tango" was both informative and entertaining, heavily emphasizing the works of Astor Piazzolla. It was the perfect vehicle for introducing tangos, the Latin alter ego of the blues and jazz. Tango, the dance form, was represented by three accomplished couples, performing to various shorter works in the first half. It was the evening's weakest element. The couples, though of competition caliber, generated too little real dynamic variation with their pat stylings and over-the-top costumes. Of greater impact were the dramatic vocal numbers by singers Marga Mitchell and Eduardo Nijensohn.

The real revelation was the astonishingly modern yet traditionally grounded body of Piazzolla's work. The orchestra, anchored by master bandoneon player Raul Juarena, navigated six of these wildly imaginative and complex compositions with admirable transparency, texture and punch. The soloist and the orchestra melded perfectly in the evening's highlight, "Concierto Para Bandoneon." Piazzolla's voice, an improbable but irrepressible blend of Argentine traditions, European modern classicism and American jazz, came through clearly and with great spirit.

PAN AM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Mark Adamo   
Column: PERFORMING ARTS
October 7, 1992; Page b10

"Pan Am Symphony's "Maria": Ave! 

"With Placido Domingo taking charge of the Washington Opera and leading it in new directions, this is shaping up as a year for Spanish and Latin American opera in Washington.  But the trend doesn't begin with Domingo or his company; it was launched Friday night at Trinity College under the humble but skilled auspices of the Pan American Symphony Orchestra and conductor Sergio Alessandro Buslje.

            "Maria de Buenos Aires," which will be repeated tonight and tomorrow night in the chapel of Trinity College on Michigan Avenue NE, was called an "operita" (little opera) by its composer, Astor Piazzolla (1921-92), to distinguish it from both the more pretentious genre of grand opera and the more frivolous operetta. 

            It has similarities to both those forms and even more to oratorio, but it is utterly unlike anything else that is likely to happen in Washington this season, including the Washington Opera's "Il Guarany" and "El Gato Montes."  Opera lovers with adventurous tastes will find it stage and wonderful, as well as, perhaps, a bit confusing.

            There is nothing at all confusing about the music.  Piazzolla became world famous in his later years as the kind of Argentine tango, and that passionate, rhythmically exciting dance form, with variations, is the basic musical language of "Maria de Buenos Aires" -- a language that s powerful, engaging and easy to understand. The text, by Piazzolla's poet friend Horacio Ferrer, presents more problems, not only because its Spanish is peppered with lunfardo - Buenos Aires slang -- but because the story has a surrealistic plot laden with both Christian and secular symbols.

            Maria is many kinds of woman, unattainable but also a prostitute, dead but resurrected, simultaneously tragic and comic, and invoked at the end with a litany that echoes the "Ave Maria":

            Our Maria of Buenos Aires,

            Forgotten art thou among women,

            Our Maria of Buenos Aires,

            Portent art thou among women.

            Among other dimensions, the "operita" is a love song to Buenos Aires, symbolized by Maria. The men who love, lose, curse and manipulate her are as symbolic as Maria:  a goblin (actually a duende, for which no precise equivalent exists in English), a street person named Buenos aires Dreamy Sparrow, a psychoanalyst, thieves, marionettes, bricklayers, a gaucho minstrel.  The story dissolves in a cloud of poetic-symbolic details, which are what count.

            The more Spanish you know, the better, and the inexpensive libretto sold at the door (full Spanish text with English summary) is helpful. But the words create their own music, independent of their literal meaning, and this music blends magically with Piazzolla's tangos.

            The Pan American Symphony Orchestra is a community ensemble- amateur but quite skilled -- with a special interest in Latin American music, and it did justice to this challenging work, with the help of four world class-class soloists: Raul Jaurena, master of the accordion-like bandoneon, which is the archetypal tango instrument; Hugo Medrano, a narrator with impressive acting skills, Venezuelan mezzo-soprano Marga Mitchell, with a voice of great dramatic and musical power, and Argentine tenor Martin de Leon, who has quite simply one of the finest voices I have ever heard for tango and Latin american popular music.

            Conductor Buslje has done a remarkable job of organizing this show and making it work in performance.