It's tempting to compare the commissioned composer, Gabriela Ortiz Torres, to a modern-day Antonio Salieri, but that would be badmouthing Salieri, who in his time was well known throughout Europe. While Ortiz Torres may be a prominent figure in Mexico (she's a composition professor at the Mexican University of Mexico City), her music is invisible on the international scene. However, like Salieri, her work, Aroma Foliado: Gesto de Mozart, was competent, exhibiting its own charm and drama, but ultimately forgettable.

....had you played a recording of Ortiz Torres's quartet for me and asked me to identify the nationality and era of the composer, I would have guessed it was written by someone from the United States in the late 1940s/early 1950s. That's because it sounded, on the surface, so much like Bartók, and there were many Bartók imitators in this country around that time. It's easy enough to evoke him, as these long forgotten Americans and Ortiz Torres did. The sections of the quartet with glassy sustained chords above or under which a tenuous, winding melody emerges are the bastard descendants of Bartók's "night music" style. The harmonies revealed a tonal skeleton underneath dissonant elaborations. The crunchy, vigorous dances in asymmetrical meters are Bartókian as well. One section evoked Stravinsky more than Bartók, with its motor rhythms and kaleidoscopically repeating fragments (again, something you might find a young American composer in the late 1940s doing).

There were two features of Ortiz Torres's piece that reflected a departure from that idiom. One was the single-movement form of the work, divided into highly contrasting sections. (Bartók, of course, was obsessed with large-scale, goal-driven form.) The other was the incorporation of quotations from Mozart's String Quartet no. 21 in D, K. 575. Despite these postmodern aspects, the entire work had the flavor of a woman ignoring her own culture and time to write music that sounded like United States males imitating a European (but at least Bartok was from the earlier imitators's own time).

In Mexico, there are elite families of fair-skinned Mexicans who claim pure descent from Spaniards, their aristocratic blood lines never mingled with Indians. There's something perverse, at least to an American mongrel like myself, about someone in our time and on our continent mindlessly insisting on maintaining their pure Spanish identity. Aroma Foliado, reminded me of those Mexican elite: it's proudly European and anachronistic....

Read the entire review here.