Eduardo Mata leads the Baltimore Symphony this week in a program that the Mexican conductor describes sadly as "an exception for me."
His disappointment comes not from any lack of affection for Dvorak's "Scherzo Capriccioso," Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra or Schumann's Piano Concerto, which Mata will perform with his friend, the great Czech pianist Ivan Moravec. It's because he isn't conducting any 20th century Latin American music.
"I always try to play at least one Latin American work," the conductor says in a telephone interview from his home south of Mexico City. "I did propose several pieces [to the BSO], but none of them seemed to work out."
The works Mata proposed were probably by such composers as the Mexican Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940), the Cuban Julian Orbon (1925-1991) or the Argentinian Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) -- all of whom are represented on Mata's discs for jTC Dorian Records. The recordings are done with the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela in a series the conductor hopes will eventually comprise a comprehensive sampling of Latin American classical music in the 20th century.
This is not to say that Mata is a specialist in Latin American music. For 16 years -- until the end of last season -- he was music director of the Dallas Symphony, where he regularly met with success in music by composers as diverse as Mahler and Stravinsky or Mozart and Shostakovich. It is not an exaggeration, in fact, to call his Dallas tenure a triumph. The still youthful conductor -- he is only 52 -- left with the unprecedented title of Conductor Emeritus for Life.
When Mata went to Dallas in 1976 as a relatively unknown, 34-year-old conductor, he went to an orchestra that had been to the brink and back many times. He could not have arrived at a worse time. After a declaration of bankruptcy in 1973, the orchestra endured a series of unsuccessful, short-lived music directorships; at the same time, financial cutbacks had created a hemorrhage of Dallas's best players. Although it had a distinguished history -- Antal Dorati, Paul Kletzki and Walter Hendl were among its previous music directors -- Dallas did not seem like a promising place for a young man to make a career.
