PROGRAM NOTES

by Phillip Huscher

Evencio Castellanos
Born May 3, 1915, Ca, Venezuela.
Died March 20, 1984, Caracas, Venezuela.

Santa Cruz de Pacairigua, Suite Sinfnica

Castellanos composed Santa Cruz de Pacairigua in 1954. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two
oboes and english horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones and tuba, timpani, snare drum, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, bells, glockenspiel,
xylophone, harp, piano, celesta, and strings. Performance time is approximately sixteen minutes.
Like Armando Revern, the painter who is currently being celebrated with an unprecedented retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the composer Evencio Castellanos is little known outside his
native Venezuela.
MoMA describes Revern as an artist unlike any other ever exhibited there (this is the first major
exhibition of his work organized by a North American museum)a painter who sought to establish a
specifically Venezuelan modernism and who was just beginning to be celebrated in Venezuela at the time
of his death. Castellanos, who is almost completely unfamiliar on concert programs in our country, also
played a role in Venezuelan modernism.
Castellanos was born in the town of Ca, where he learned to play the organ and the harmonium from his
father, who was organist at the local chapel. He then moved to nearby Caracas to study piano, and in
1931 he became the organist of the cathedral there. In Caracas, he was a composition student of Vicente
Emilio Sojo, who is regarded as one of the founding members of modern Venezuelan music. Sojo almost
single-handedly renewed musical life in Caracas, a city with a vibrant musical tradition dating back at
least to the sixteenth century. Sojo helped to establish the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra in 1930 and
was its chief conductor for nearly two decades. Castellanos himself would eventually conduct that
orchestra, along with a number of the twentieth centurys most famous conductors and composers,
including Wilhelm Furtwngler, Sergiu Celibidache, Walter Klemperer, Igor Stravinsky (whose name,
according to the composers amanuensis Robert Craft, came out sounding like Travithky in the local
accent), and Pierre Boulez (who conducted Prokofievs Classical Symphony there for the only time in his
career when parts for a Bartk score didnt arrive).
In 1945, when Castellanos graduated from the Escuela Superior de Msica, which Sojo directed, he
played his own Piano Concerto, his first work with strong nationalistic tendencies. But like Revern, who
went to Spain and to Paris to further his studies as a painter, Castellanos wanted to expand his horizons
beyond Venezuelas burgeoning new cultural nationalism, and so in the mid-1940s, he moved to New
York City, where he enrolled at the Dalcroze School of Music. But it was his return to Caracas in 1949 that
launched his most productive period as a composer. While Revern was content to live out his days
painting in a palm-frond hut in the fishing village of Macuto on the Caribbean coast, far from the whirl of
the modern art world, Castellanos remained at the heart of Venezuelas music life and then moved to
Paris in the early 1970s, where he gave organ recitals at Notre Dame. When he returned to Caracas
shortly before his death, he was revered at home, but he was still little known elsewhere.
Like the music by his teacher Sojo, Castellanoss work is rooted in Venezuelan folklore and native musical
tradition. He won the National Prize for Music in 1954 for Santa Cruz de Pacairigua (Holy Cross of
Pacairigua), named after a small church near Caracas that celebrates an annual Feast of the Cross. A
symphonic suite in three connected sections, the work combines colorful folk tunes, dazzling rhythms (the
percussion section is kept particularly busy), and even threads of Gregorian chant in the final section
depicting the religious celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may be reproduced only in their
entirety and with express written permission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to
change without notice.