World-premiere recordings of early works which shed new light on a foundational figure of classical music in Mexico.
Until now, it has been commonly held that Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) only began to write music in his 30s – during the last decade of a life cut prematurely short by alcoholism and pneumonia. At age 39, he had belatedly assumed the status of the most important Mexican composer of his generation, through orchestral works such as Sensemaya and La noche de los Mayos; pieces which are much less indebted to European models than the work of his elders and contemporaries such as Carlos Chavez.
Yet the rediscovery of these manuscripts, as recently as 2024, demonstrates that Revueltas had been composing from his teenage years onwards; and that he was an accomplished pianist as well as violinist. On this pioneering volume of his piano music, there are 24 separate pieces, none longer than a four-minute Lento doloroso, all individual movements aside from a two-movement Sonatina. Most of them date from 1915, during his study at the National Conservatoire, though later works also come from Revueltas’s later study in Chicago, during 1919, and then 1924, when he wrote what has come down to us as his last piano piece, a Satie-like caprice titled Tragedia en forma de rábano (Tragedy in the Form of a Radish).
Through their course, these pieces form a musical diary which both pays tribute to the instruction of Revueltas’s teachers such as Rafael J. Tello and Felipe Villanueva, as well as tracing a path of evolution between Mexican romanticism and modernism in music.
Of Mexican and German parentage, the pianist Rodolfo Ritter is a professor at the conservatoire in Mexico City, and a musician who has worked to promote the music of his homeland, as a performer, editor and musicologist. He has given many premieres of works by Mexican composers, but also performances of the canon concerto repertoire from Chopin to Bartók. His scholarship and musicianship distinguish him as the ideal artist to bring these forgotten pieces by Revueltas to international attention.
