By Lyn Bronson

[This review will appear in the Salinas Californian on Monday, February 16, 2009]

Guest Conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto

Valentine’s day was winding down Saturday evening and the mother of all storms was approaching the Monterey Peninsula poised to hit us early the following morning. However, inside Sherwood Hall everything was very much under control as the Monterey Symphony treated us to some very meaningful music from Mexico featuring an exciting young Mexican guest conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto and his cellist father, Carlos Prieto, who was on board to perform a cello concerto he had himself commissioned.

Slim, energetic, dynamic and enthusiastic are words that come to mind to describe conductor Prieto. His supremely confident approach to the major works on the evening’s program elicited topnotch performances from the symphony players. The first work on the program was Redes (“Fish Nets”), a suite by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940), who had a well developed social conscience and was angered by the exploitation endured by Mexican fishermen who eked out a precarious life to make a meager living. Revueltas originally wrote this work as a film score, which was later extracted and condensed into a symphonic version by distinguished Austrian conductor, Erik Kleiber. Exciting rhythms (especially by the percussion section’s several players), powerful tunes derived from Mexican folk music and novel orchestral effects made this work a winner from beginning to end.

In the following work on the program we heard the father, cellist Miguel Prieto, in a fine performance of Federico Ibarra’s Cello Concerto. This is a startlingly original work that is so skillfully written that the orchestra pretty much stays out of the way of the solo cello part, except when the cello is tacit, and then it makes it presence known with sound and fury. The quiet, eerie sounds coming from the strings during the cello solo in the slow movement were magical effects we are not likely to forget. In the final movement we heard cellist Prieto playing a spooky melody in harmonics against a fabulous percussion solo. It was a knockout!

The concert ended with a full blooded performance of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. In this wonderfully romantic work, Prieto went into overdrive and and got 110% out of the score. Both the Iberra Concerto and the Schumann Symphony received enthusiastic standing ovations. Olè!

End