Manuel Ponce (who died nearly half a century ago, in his mid-sixties) has been called the “father of Mexican musical nationalism”; but in his Piano Concerto (his first sizeable work) there is little, if any, trace of local colour. This is a showy, conventional late-romantic work of the barnstorming variety, and despite a great deal of bravura piano writing – Ponce himself was the soloist in its first performance in 1912 – its sound and fury do not amount to much musically. Osorio (who made an agreeable record of Ponce’s solo piano music for ASV, 5/95) is suitably exhibitionist: the orchestral sound is a bit shrill.
By 1941, the year of the Concierto del sur, Ponce’s style had changed and matured, he having meanwhile studied in Paris with Dukas; and this is one of the best guitar concertos in the repertory (though far outdone in popularity by a much inferior work by a composer 20 years his junior); its Mexican character is evident in the festive finale. Moreno’s performance is strong in urgency and intensity though, remembering John Williams’s classic recording, it could have had a greater sense of poetry in the Andante.
Ponce’s only other concerto, that for violin two years later, is his best-known thanks to the championship of Szeryng, its dedicatee, and through the inclusion in its melancholy second movement of references to his famous song Estrellita (whose rights he had unwittingly surrendered to an astute publisher). Szeryng plays the virtuoso solo part – which includes a lengthy cadenza, as does the guitar concerto – brilliantly, but in the acoustic of the Mexican hall used for this mid-1980s recording the tuttis are somewhat thick and rowdy. '