The Orchestra of the Americas & Carlos Miguel Prieto - de Falla - The Scotsman

The Orchestra of the Americas is a crack team, its transitory membership (they tend to graduate to the top jobs in top orchestras) drawn from a worldwide talent pool aged 18 to 30. That’s evident from the start of Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, which opens this pairing of the better-known Diaghilev-inspired ballet with the more evocative Impressionism of Nights in the Gardens of Spain for piano and orchestra. The ecstatic fiesta-style cheering and clapping in the opening seconds is an electrifying clarion call that soon switches to an orchestral display of equally dazzling competence. Under musical director Carlos Miguel Prieto, Falla’s fiery rhythms and sensual colourings are intoxicating. Nights in the Gardens... inspires equal commitment and rhapsodic vision, not always incisively matched by the otherwise snappy pianism of guest soloist Jorge Federico Osorio.