You could hear clapping in the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall Friday night when renowned violinist Anne Akiko Meyers performed Arturo Márquez’s mariachi-inspired concerto “Fandango.”
But the rhythmic applause wasn’t coming from the Tucson Symphony Orchestra audience that only loosely filled the hall.
It came from Meyers’s violin, and it was more like the choreographed foot tapping you would expect to hear if you were listening to a mariachi perform the quintessential “Son de le negre” with a troupe of fantastically attired folklorico dancers twirling and swirling and stomping their way to the frenzied finale.
Meyers bowing, hitting the top half of her historic violin’s strings then the bottom in succession but never altogether, created a hallow thumping that deliciously mimicked stomping.
The TSO, led by Music Director José Luis Gomez, performed the Southwest premiere of the Márquez concerto, which Meyers commissioned from the Mexican composer just before the pandemic. She and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Márquez in the audience, performed the world premier of the work in August 2021 and she has performed it several times since.
“Fandango” checked all the boxes that Gomez must have envisioned when he created the orchestra’s season long ¡Celebracion Latina! series; “Fandango Fabuloso” was the third concert in the series; the first two were the Mexican Independence Day shows Sept. 15 and 17. The concerto had flashes of flamenco and resonated with the soulful and brassy richness of mariachi from the opening “Folia Tropical” movement to the playful and energetic “Fandanguito” finale.
Most of the heavy lifting was on Meyers, from long solo lines in the sultry and sublime “Plegaria” movement to the rush of the finale where her fingers danced over the fret at a pace that at times seemed almost a blur from the audience.
She created an indelible rhythmic tension in the “Folio Tropical” that Gomez and the orchestra accentuated with brassy and percussive interruptions that brought out the rich Latin accents throughout the piece. “Fandango” also had classical undertones that reminded you of music written centuries ago, not a couple of years ago.
From the opening notes, Meyers and Gomez fell into a dance that borrowed from the rhythms of mariachi and flamenco, with sweeping woodwinds and percussion that invited Meyers to disrupt with an energetic passage fusing folklorico and flamenco. As she played, her fingers dancing along the fret as she created a percussive stomp with her bow, it reminded us of the only other time we saw her on a Tucson stage — when she introduced herself in 2018 with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.
That TSO performance was a feat of physical and virtuosic dexterity; this one was equally as challenging, but it also seemed to strike a deeper resonance for Meyers. Every note she played and subtle gesture, from an occasional passing glance toward Gomez at the podium and nod toward the musicians behind her, telegraphed to the audience her deep respect for the musical traditions of Mexico that Márquez represented.
“Fandango” was the centerpiece of Friday’s concert, the TSO’s official season opener which the orchestra will repeat at 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 25, at the Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave.
The concert was bookended by the orchestra’s premiere of Robert Muczynski’s cinematic “Charade” with all its rich woodwind passages and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor, which the orchestra had not performed since 2015. Gomez accentuated the emotional rollercoaster of the Tchaikovsky, from the dynamic urgency of the opening movement to the elegance in the sweeping waltz to the crushing triumph of the finale.
For tickets, visit tucsonsymphony.org.
