Performance: Nora Chastain, violin; Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen conducted by Gabriel Castagna

About Concierto Indio:

“This work is an orchestration work on an original for violin and piano: La SUITE INDÍGENA composed in 1930. A decade later Valcárcel made an orchestral arrangement of movements 2 and 4, while the transcriptions of 1 and 3 were made in 1942 by the German musician Rodolfo Holzmann (1910-1992), with direct approval of the composer. The final manuscript is signed in Lima, Peru; February 1942.

The original version was written partly in Lima (prior to his second European stay) and partly in Paris. It is plausible here to quote the lines with which Fernando Valcárcel (grandnephew of the composer) describes this work by his great-uncle:

‘[In 1930] he concludes his INDIGENOUS SUITE, for violin and piano, which he would later orchestrate under the name INDIAN CONCERT ten years later. It is the first Violin Concerto in the history of Peruvian music […] The fourth movement is of very original elaboration, halfway between sonata and rondo form, with a beautiful, very idiomatic cadenza for the violin.’

Finally, the postponed premiere of the INDIAN CONCERT was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra of Peru under the baton of José Belaunde Moreyra with the soloist participation of Manuel Díaz on July 28, 1969 ‘in gala of Fiestas Patrias’ at the Municipal Theater of Lima.”

– New Iberian-American Musical Gazette

About Theodoro Valcárcel:

“Theodoro Valcárcel was one of the most significant Peruvian composers in the first half of the twentieth century. He published a wide variety of works, including ballets, a violin concerto, a symphonic poem, piano pieces, chamber pieces, and many songs.

Valcárcel belongs to a group of Peruvian artists and musicians who, starting around 1920, turned to folklore traditions for inspiration. He was one of the first composers to use indigenous melodies as well as indigenous languages in his compositions. The Tahwa inka’j tak’y-nam (Cuatro canciones inkaicas, Four Inca Songs)—recorded especially for Art Song Augmented by soprano Camille Ortiz, pianist Gustavo Castro, and recording engineer Joseph Wenda—are a case in point. Drawn from a larger collection called Treinta y un cantos del alma vernácula (Thirty-One Songs of the Vernacular Soul), these four songs feature lyrics in Quechua, an indigenous language spoken by the Quechua people of the Peruvian Andes. Valcárcel himself was descended from the Aymara people, another indigenous Andean group; the Treinta y un cantos del alma vernácula also include songs in the Aymara language.

The Tahwa inka’j tak’y-nam use predominantly pentatonic melodies, a type of melody that Valcárcel himself identified as a hallmark of Inca music. Yet those pentatonic melodies are clothed in lush, dense, and sometimes strikingly dissonant harmonies. In other words, the songs fuse Valcárcel’s native heritage and his largely foreign training. (He studied in Milan with the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni, a composer who experimented with atonality and once wrote that “music is born free and destined to regain its freedom.”) It’s not known whether Valcárcel borrowed these melodies from actual songs he heard in the Andes or whether he partially or fully invented them himself. Regardless, as with so much if his work, these songs are vivid examples of music that deftly blends indigenous and modernist musical idioms.”

– Art Song Augmented