A prodigiously gifted musician, Revueltas also had solid training, at the National Conservatory in Mexico City, followed by St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX, and the Chicago College of Music. In his 20s he conducted orchestras in the US and gave violin recitals, some with conductor and composer Carlos Chávez. It was Chávez who brought Revueltas back to Mexico City in 1929, as his assistant conductor for the Mexico Symphony Orchestra.

Revueltas began writing short chamber pieces in the 1920s. With a good orchestra now at hand, he began to compose orchestral music and film scores. He wrote the first version of the short symphonic poem Janitzio for a small orchestra in 1933 and conducted its premiere performances that year.

That version was dedicated to Chávez and Armando Echevarría (the orchestra’s librarian). In 1935, the two composer-conductors had a very public break, after Revueltas replaced Chávez as composer for the film Redes (Nets). When Revueltas revised the Janitzio score in 1936, greatly expanding the orchestration, he removed the dedications.

“It is illuminating to contrast the work of Chávez with that of his countryman, the late Silvestre Revueltas, whose vibrant, tangy scores sing of a more colorful, perhaps a more mestizo side of the Mexican character,” Aaron Copland wrote in 1952. “Revueltas was a man of the people, with a wonderfully keen ear for the sounds of the people’s music.”

Janitzio is an island in Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán. It had become a tourist destination, and Revueltas wrote a brief note about making his own contribution to tourism and “music of the postcard type.” Self-deprecating sarcasm aside, the piece is indeed a colorful musical picture—an A-B-A triptych really, with lively music of brilliant flair and rhythmic drive framing a contemplative core of serene instrumental duets over a steadily pulsating pedal point in the string basses.

—John Henken