Recording of the Week, Venezuela! from Domingo Hindoyan and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Following terrific recordings of French repertoire, verismo, Bruckner and works by the Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and its charismatic Chief Conductor Domingo Hindoyan are back today with an album of music from the Caracas-born maestro’s homeland. Featuring pieces by Evencio Castellanos, Juan Bautista Plaza, Inocente Carreňo, Antonio Estévez and Yuri Hung, Venezuela! may be the best thing they’ve done together yet, and the bar was set high.

With the exception of the closing piece by Hung, all of these works date from the mid-twentieth century - whilst none of the composers are exactly household names, three of the six pieces may be familiar to anyone who enjoyed Gustavo Dudamel’s Fiesta album with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra back in 2008. Hindoyan certainly gives his compatriot a run for his money in terms of the energy and ear for detail which he brings to this music, and the Liverpool players sound like they’re having the time of their lives throughout.

If (like me) you were expecting this album to burst into life with a riot of dance-rhythms, bright orchestral colours and a percussion section on overdrive, you’ll be pleasantly wrong-footed by the curtain-raiser – written in 1928, Juan Bautista Plaza’s soft-focus Vigilia wouldn’t have sounded out of place alongside Debussy and Roussel on that French album I mentioned earlier.

Taking inspiration from a poem by Nobel Prize-winner Juan Ramón Jiménez (and composed as a love-letter to Plaza’s wife-to-be), it depicts a sleepless night in the city with a radiant, shape-shifting beauty which put me in mind of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé from sixteen years earlier. The Liverpool strings (and the eloquent cor anglais soloist) are on glowing form here: Hindoyan’s canny programming gives them a welcome chance to shine before brass and percussion take centre-stage later in the album, and there’s an especially striking passage for solo violin and harp before dawn is ushered in by flutes imitating birdsong.

The contemplative mood is dispelled with a bang by the exuberant opening of Castellanos’s Santa Cruz de Pacairigua, which hits the ground running with mariachi-style trumpets vaulting into the stratosphere and the RLPO timpanist really going to town. (When Hindoyan spoke to us two years ago about his plans to introduce this music to Liverpool, he remarked that ‘it’s not so often that you can find percussionists with the right sense of rhythm, but they absolutely nailed it!’. I couldn’t agree more.)

Written for the consecration of a small church in Caracas in 1954, the piece is a brilliant juxtaposition of the sacred and profane, as glimpses of a solemn procession (complete with church-bells and sonorous brass chorales) are repeatedly and gleefully eclipsed by a carnival whirlwind featuring virtuosic xylophone solos, a thunder-sheet and essentially everything barring the kitchen sink. The clarity and precision which Hindoyan brings to this organised chaos is a marvel, all captured in superb detail by Christopher Tann and Liverpool regular Andrew Cornall.

Inocente Carreňo’s evocative portrait of the island of Margarita brings cinematic scale to a Venezuelan folk-melody, with each of the woodwinds getting their moment in the spotlight as birds of various feathers hover over the sea (a solo for bassoon with col legno string accompaniment is especially arresting) and a declamatory ending that’s oddly reminiscent of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.

Next up is Castellanos’s 1946 tone-poem El Río de las Siete Estrellas (‘The River of the Seven Stars’) – at once a musical journey down the Orinoco and a brief history of Venezuela, it shares a certain kinship with Smetana’s Vltava. Opening with a haunting lament of the indigenous people, it moves through a series of military episodes depicting the battle for independence before closing in a blaze of glory.

You can almost feel the heat-haze descend as Antonio Estévez’s depiction of the midday horizon in Medodía en el llano stirs into life with shimmering strings and languorous woodwind solos, before the storm breaks in Hung’s brief but breathtaking orchestral toccata Kanaima - a vivid depiction of a tropical monsoon which brings the album to an electrifying close. The 2024 Presto Awards committee meets for the first time next Tuesday, and I’ll certainly be batting hard for this eleventh-hour entry.