RUMBARROCO — Boston’s Latin-Baroque fusion ensemble
Bach never set foot in the Americas. His counterpoint did.
Bach and Vivaldi a lo Latino follows the fugue as it crosses an ocean and picks up an accent. RUMBARROCO places Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi side by side with the Latin American composers who studied them, absorbed them, and answered back — proof that a well-made subject and countersubject will travel anywhere, and arrive sounding like the place it landed.
Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote nine suites he called Bachianas Brasileiras, Baroque procedure poured into Brazilian song; we perform No. 5, whose Aria for soprano floats over a choir of low strings like a da capo aria that grew up in Rio. Astor Piazzolla, who took the tango to the conservatory and the conservatory to the tango, is represented by Fugata — the strict Bachian form seized by bandoneón-era drama. From Venezuela come Miguel Astor, Modesta Bor, Gregory Pino, and Aldemaro Romero, whose Fuga con Pajarillo is the moment the audience realizes a fugue can, in fact, dance.
And because so much of our work is with young people, the program includes a delight: Fugues on Children’s Song Themes — Miguel Astor’s fugue on Los Pollitos and Gregory Pino’s on Palomita Blanca, built in three and four voices on melodies every Latin American child can sing from memory. Nursery tunes given the full contrapuntal treatment: rigorous enough for the counterpoint lovers, irresistible for everyone else, and “secretly” the best fugue lesson you’ll ever get without a blackboard.
Throughout, period instruments share the stage with Latin American ones — viola da gamba beside cuatro, Baroque strings beside maracas — and Vivaldi’s Lute Concerto in D major arrives on a tiple, the twelve-string Colombian guitar. Nothing is lost in the exchange; the music simply changes color. It is the clearest evidence of the evening’s argument: this repertoire never belonged to one continent, and it never stopped traveling.
Music that crossed an ocean, changed clothes, and learned to dance. Come hear how it sounds now.
