La Noche de los Mayas

The music evokes pre-Columbian landscapes and images with a cinematic grandeur, sweep and colorfulness that go beyond the merely picturesque. The suite reaches its climax (in more ways than one) in the fourth section, "Night of Sorcery," featuring no fewer than a dozen percussion instruments--drums, gourds, rasps, even a conch shell--leading a Mayan sacrificial dance. Think of a manic cross between "The Rite of Spring," Carlos Chávez and Philip Glass and you will get an idea of this astonishing finale. In his brief spoken remarks as well as in his rousing, rhythmically charged performance. -- John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, on "La noche de los Mayas"