Ponce: Piano Music Volume 1Manuel Maria PonceAlbumGenre: ClassicalDescription: While Rodolfo Ritter’s repertoire encompasses many well-known and unfamiliar composers he has made a speciality of Ponce’s piano music. He recorded the two piano concertos (for Sterling) in 2013 as well as several solo pieces. Now for Piano Classics he embarks on a new adventure which should win new friends everywhere for an idiom full of charm and optimism essentially Romantic in spirit and piquantly coloured by the composer’s Mexican heritage. A social and cultural revolution followed on the heels of Mexico’s political revolution of 1910-1917 as a once largely rural nation became within a matter of years predominantly urban. Born in 1882 Manuel Ponce in some ways embodied the outward-facing spirit of that revolution as the country’s first internationally renowned composer of European-style art music (‘classical’) and yet in the nostalgia-soaked language of that music evoked a romanticized past. This is the tension explored by Rodolfo Ritter as he begins a multi-volume journey through Ponce’s piano output – only the second pianist to do so on record.
