At Blas Galindo, there was a mixture of feverish vitality and mature temperance.

▲ Maestro Diemecke at the head of the OECCh, during the program "Of Myths and Legends." Photo by Ángel Vargas

Angel Vargas

La Jornada Newspaper, Monday, June 2, 2025, p. 4

The Blas Galindo Auditorium at the National Center for the Arts (Cenart) became a place of the unusual last Saturday.

Under the wise baton of guest conductor Enrique Arturo Diemecke, the Carlos Chávez School Orchestra (OECCh) embarked on a unique sonic journey through unexpected times and places with the program "Of Myths and Legends," which was repeated yesterday at the Los Pinos Cultural Complex.

It was a kind of musical exorcism in which mountain demons and hallucinated lovers danced to the rhythm of the notes of A Night on the Barren Mountain, by the Russian Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), and The Fantastic Symphony, by the French Hector Berlioz (1803-1869).

A captivating experience for the audience, which filled almost three-quarters of the venue and enjoyed the feverish vitality of the young members of the group for nearly an hour and a half, guided by the composure, knowledge, and intensity of that mature Mexican director, one of the most important figures in national music today.

For every musician, it is always a privilege to share what they love most in life: music , Diemecke commented in a brief intervention, microphone in hand, before raising the baton for the first time and beginning that sort of spell made up of that pair of works that have to do with the supernatural.

It sounds corny, I know, but music is food for the soul. And it is because our spirit is always full of anxieties, worries, love, passion, dedication, happiness, and sadness, and we need something to help us balance all of that. That's where music comes in.

Mussorgsky's work was a sonorous witches' sabbath. The brass spewed flames, the strings cast disturbing shadows. Diemecke, like a shaman, drew from the young performers an infernal crescendo that culminated in redemptive bells.

"That evil mountain teaches us that after the storm comes calm, that nothing is lost ," the director announced at the beginning. The audience, ecstatic, burst into applause at the end of the piece.

Berlioz's Opium Dream

After a brief intermission, the psychedelic journey of the Symphonie Fantastique began. Beforehand, Diemecke took the microphone to tell the anecdote about this work. Berlioz, heartbroken by love, attempted suicide by taking opium, but dreamed of his own death, he recounted.

The work was a dreamlike journey of five movements in which the strings and woodwinds went from sigh to cry, the brass led to brilliant moments, and there was also a passage in which the English horn and oboe emulated the dialogue of two shepherds in the field.

Furthermore, a march led the way from the scaffold to the guillotine, and the Gregorian dies irae (song of anger) mingled with the laughter of the witches to conclude this bizarre experience in this way.

The audience, somewhere between astonished and still enthralled, reacted festively to such a powerful and accomplished performance, with thunderous applause. The young musicians thus demonstrated that they have managed to form a cohesive, balanced, and powerful orchestra.

Diemecke, true to his passionate style, conducted both works from memory, without a score; nor did he use a baton. He inhabited the music and let it inhabit him, based on his signature choreography, in which the marvelous sound becomes ductile material that he molds between his hands and the rest of his body, with showy movements that range from the subtle to the dizzying.