For Robert Treviño, Classical Music Was Never Elitist

Classical music’s recording industry may be a shadow of its former self, but sometimes, a bit of light shines through. One of the brightest of late has been Robert Treviño, a Mexican American conductor who has been the music director of the Basque National Orchestra in San Sebastián, Spain, since 2017.

Treviño, 40, has drawn acclaim in the past several years for recordings that are carefully prepared, exquisitely rendered and attentively controlled without ever sounding at all cautious. Enthusiastic fanfare greeted two Ravel discs on Ondine that tried to reclaim the composer as fundamentally Basque, and hence subject, as Treviño wrote in a note, to the “gravitational pulls of the Iberian Peninsula and France.”

I have particularly admired remarkably sensitive Respighi with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, of which Treviño is currently the principal guest conductor, and a frankly gorgeous survey of Bruch with the Bamberg Symphony on CPO.

Most intriguing, and perhaps most revealing of Treviño himself, are “Americascapes,” a pair of bold releases of American music with his Basque ensemble. The first volume smartly explores works by Charles Martin Loeffler, Carl Ruggles, Howard Hanson and Henry Cowell. The second, which was released last Friday, begins with George Walker and ends with Silvestre Revueltas. At its dark heart is an aptly eerie, indeed at times quite ghastly account of George Crumb’s “A Haunted Landscape.”