Only careful observers of the contemporary music scene are likely to know the music of Jimmy Lopez, the Peruvian-born, Bay Area-resident, 36-year-old composer, whose education in his craft took him from a long stint in the Promised Land of Finland to a period of academic polish at UC Berkeley, an increasingly important breeding ground for young composers. But Lopez will undergo three degrees of going public in bigger ways in 2015.
On YouTube, you can hear what is arguably his most personal composition to date, Man and Man, played at his Grace Cathedral wedding to his husband Heleno in May. It's a work for countertenor, chamber orchestra and the fine Grace Cathedral organ, and its sound, if safely this side of bustin' its buttons, is a bit like Britten without the angst.
On Aug. 14, Harmonia Mundi will release four of his orchestral works, played by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Miguel Harth-Bedoya, a regular colleague and inspirator of Lopez's. Not unlike the wedding anthem, it's notably amiable music. To call it that is not intended to open the usual can of worms: is it minimalist, neo-romantic, audience-pleasing in some obsequious way? The facts are: it's music you can get on the first hearing with just a normal degree of listening; it's overall unmistakably upbeat and leavened with a non-jokey good humor; it's evocative of Lopez's South American roots without being mysteriously so, or glibly playing the multicultural card; it's grounded in standard orchestral instrumentation, plus a few bird sounds. And it's smart in a way that doesn't make you feel less so.
The most raucous and ambitious of the four works is the CD's last, America Salvaje (Wild Americas), in which Andean instruments do feature, prominently, just not in that drippy Simon and Garfunkel-y way. But their integration with the orchestra's standard instruments is complete, and the regionalist feeling derives as much from the pulsing, off-the-beat rhythms as from exotic sounds. The piece builds steadily in momentum, creeping up on you rather in the style of the dance movements of West Side Story . There's aural evidence that it's not all serene in the lower-hemisphere jungle either, and that the natural world struggles and groans like its human counterparts all over the world. But a sense of celebration in the madness, which builds steadily to a big sonic climax, is at least as sonorous as the alarms. It's a big piece of music, handled with confidence by composer and players alike.
Peru Negro (Black Peru), commissioned by the conductor for the Fort Worth Symphony's 2012-13 season, also derives from Afro-Peruvian sources. The composer says it references six traditional songs, but I can attest that you don't need to know them to succumb to its "personal" (Lopez's word) touch.
Lord of the Air, also from 2012, evokes the magnificence of the Andean condor in flight. It's functionally a cello concerto, masterfully dispatched by Jesus Castro-Balbi, but it's constricted neither by classical concerto form nor by sentimental or political pleas for the endangered birds' survival. And you can relax from the beginning �" it's scrubbed of Ferde Grofe pictorialism. Still, its four distinct movements are rendered in keen musical colors, and the trajectory of the bird's flight, "Soaring the Heights" in the so-named third movement, is described in fluid rhythmical gestures and sonic yearnings that emerge from unexaggerated extended playing techniques from both soloist and band.
My clear favorite of the four is 2011's Synesthesie, whose five two-minute movements address the components of human sensation, i.e., touch, smell, taste, hearing, seeing, with distinct vocabularies that nevertheless overlap to achieve the precise �" or, rather, tellingly imprecise �" synesthetic effects the composer sought to evoke. There are surprises in the musical evocations of each of the senses; there's nothing trite here. It would appear, at first, that the highly robust "Gout" (taste) would be the boss, but the settling of scores between hearing and seeing, across both of which cacophony takes over the sound palette, proves genuinely cross-sensual, if not stridently politically so.
But Lopez's biggest venture to date will be Lyric Opera of Chicago's premiere of Bel Canto, the composer's opera based on Ann Patchett's exuberant novel in a libretto by Nilo Cruz, who also wrote the words for Man and Man, this time with texts in Spanish, English, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Latin and Quechua. Renee Fleming's presence on the Chicago Board is said to have been influential in getting Lopez the choice commission, but another measure of faith in the project is Fleming's handing the starring role to fellow soprano Danielle de Niesse, with a roster of other top-flight professionals. Performances are Dec. 7, 10 & 12, and Jan. 5, 8, 13 & 17, 2016.
Based on the actual hostage crisis in Lopez's native Lima in 1996-97, Patchett's magical-realist novel seems in every way ripe for operatic realization. But adding to the excitement, the dangers are as apparent. The closest lightning has struck again after Tosca is Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, which hardly counts as a repertory staple. And the saga of Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna, "a day in the life of a diva," which ended his relationship with the Met and ended up in Manchester, England, is the cautionary tale. But Lopez won't be "crossing over" with Bel Canto, and the new Harmonia Mundi disc spells hope in large capitals: Lopez's music seems tailor-made for opera.