Metales M5, brassy and boisterous
By Michael Pearl 
October 17, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Concert
Metales M5, “Esta Canon”
Sun, Oct 26, 5pm
St. Paul’s Church
Cardo 6
80/150/200 pesos

Pro Musica brings Mexico’s most outstanding brass quintet to San Miguel this month. Metales M5 is based in Morelia but has not played in San Miguel before.

The group has just finished a highly successful tour of the US and Canada, where they wowed audiences with their wide-ranging repertoire and accomplished musicianship. Michael Pearl, president of Pro Musica, recently interviewed Alexander Freund, one of the group’s two trumpet players.

Michael Pearl: I have never seen a group so well received and with such joy. What is it about your playing that produces such enthusiastic audience responses? 

Alexander Freund: The whole M5 concept is based on interaction: interaction among the musicians onstage, interaction between one, two or all of us with one or more or all of the audience members. We definitely enjoy what we do, and against all “traditional” rules we allow ourselves to show it on stage. We believe that when we enjoy ourselves the audience does, too. Music can be perfect, chords can be clean, scales can be breathtaking, sounds can be gorgeous, but most people in the audience are not trained musicians and so they would not care so much about those “technical” details. The audience perceives the essential message of music and performance: emotion, joy, melancholy, humor, beauty. It’s about honesty in showing who you are as an artist. We believe that every audience member immediately senses whether you are comfortable onstage or not. 

We play exactly the same way in front of 50 or 10,000 people. We love joking around and not taking ourselves too seriously.

MP: How were you received in Chicago and Los Angeles? Did you find the audiences there different from those in Nebraska and Colorado?

AF: The tour to Chicago and LA was mainly a tour playing with the Morelia Symphony orchestra, but we took advantage of it and had held two concerts as M5 in Chicago. But every evening’s symphony concert had at least one M5 influence: Oscar and Alex had solos in “La Virgen de la Macarena,” one of M5’s big show pieces, and the other M5 members led the orchestra. 

The audiences were bigger in Colorado, Texas, Nebraska and Vermont, but they welcomed us in the same enthusiastic way. On this last tour we played mainly for Latin American audiences (mostly Mexican immigrants). 

MP: What was your reaction to playing in both small and large cities in the US? 

AF: We had very different experiences in the five cities on our first US tour. I am from Berlin and have traveled all over the world, but it was the first time my Mexican colleagues had left. Imagine how they felt seeing the amazing cultural diversity of the US! The Midwest has very laid-back people, who perhaps expect a strict separation between classical music and the popular repertoire. They were surprised, but they loved it!

MP: What is the range of your repertoire? Do audiences seem to prefer one type of music or period?

AF: There are people who tell us how much they loved the sound of the piccolo trumpets, or the Bach fugue, or Dixieland with its energy or the sentimental beauty of our Broadway pieces. They all go crazy when the show turns to the Mexican fun stuff. We play Renaissance, Baroque, opera, film music, Dixieland, blues, tango, folk…there is no limit as long as we love the music we play. If we are not convinced that the music will spark the audience, we don’t play it.

MP: How did you get together as a group?

AF: We auditioned in 2005 for the Morelia Symphony. The first day of our contract we founded the group. We spent the first two years basically putting programs together, rehearsing and playing to try things out. Then we noticed the strong feedback we had from audiences of all different cultural and social backgrounds. We played everything from festivals with 3,000 people to intimate venues.

MP: What do all of you have in common that makes you successful as a group?

AF: We love music, we love our instruments, we love being onstage and making people happy, we love to challenge ourselves, we love to travel and we are friends.

Tickets are available at La Tienda in the Biblioteca Pública; Casa de Papel, Mesones 57; La Conexión, Aldama 3; and St. Paul’s Church, Cardo 6. See Pro Musica’s website www.promusicasma.com  for more information.

Dedicated to Liona
By Rocio Velarde

Concert
Classical guitar
Arturo Velarde
Thu, Oct 23, 7:30pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública 
Insurgentes 25
100 pesos

Arturo Velarde made his debut in 1984 at Teatro Juárez in Guanajuato and subsequently received a scholarship to the university there.

He has been playing guitar in different venues all over Mexico and also given private concerts for the Rockefeller family in New York, the Brooks family in Canada and Liona Boyd, “The guitar lady of the world.” One of his best-known works, “Melancholic Prelude for Liona Boyd,” is dedicated to her. 

Fiery and brooding
By Dick Avery

Concert
Folklore harp and flamenco guitar
Sergio Basurto
Thu, Oct 23, 7:30pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Reloj 50A
150 pesos, limited seating

Sergio Basurto typically starts his set on guitar with several thoughtful, sensitive Latin American tunes to set the mood and open the audience’s ears, then proceeds to the 36-string Irish harp, offering a mini-set of music that’s bright, fanciful, lively and soulful.

The audience is totally into what he doing, some keeping time, some clapping appreciatively and sending up a “bravo” or two. He lifts that emotional setting higher by winding things up with a segment of flamenco music on guitar that hits on feelings that are at once passionate, fiery, brooding and mournful. He crams a lot of music into a one-hour set!

Gypsy outlaw
By Dick Avery

Concert 
Javier “Gitano” Estrada
Gypsy guitar and voice 
Fri, Oct 24, 7pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Reloj 50A
100 pesos


Javier Estrada doesn’t care about conventional musical trends, ideas, or thought. His music is an existential free-form, flowing back and forth from improvisation to structure. It becomes at once passionate, emotional and intense. He feels “because I am an outlaw, I play out of the law of the music formations.” He will share tender love songs and fiery, nostalgic tunes collected around the gypsy camping grounds of Europe.