USU music department's Música Viva entertains with 'immoral' Tango!

By Tamber Weston

April 13, 2005 | Tuesday night some of Latin music's finest gathered at the Caine Lyric Theatre for a presentation of Tango!

Utah State University's contemporary music ensemble, Música Viva, is made up of the music department's top students, who perform alongside faculty and guest artists.

The performance featured artists: J.P. Spicer-Escalante from USU's language department, singer/actor Paul Sperry, and musical duo Polly Ferman and Daniel Binelli. Spicer-Escalante is an assistant professor of Spanish at USU and specializes in Latin American literature. He teaches composition, conversation and business Spanish. He holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Latin American Literature and Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the founding director of an online journal called Decimonónica.

He shared his love for Latin American literature with readings in English and Spanish.

Sperry delighted the audience with his one-act chamber opera performance.

While Música Viva played a piece by Robert Xavier Rodríguez, Sperry did a number of humorous voice interpretations as he read news reports about the immorality of the tango from the early 1900s.

Sperry has degrees from Harvard University and the Sorbonne, and is on the faculty of the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, and Brooklyn College and Conservatory.

Ferman is from Uruguay, and has been hailed by The Japan Times as "Musical Ambassador of the Americas." She is one of today's leading interpreters of the piano music of Gottschalk, Nazareth, Gershwin, Villa Lobos, Ginastera and Piazzolla. Binelli of Argentina, is an internationally renowned master of the bandoneón, an accordion-like instrument characteristic of the Tango.

The placement of notes on the bandoneón, as Ferman explained, "has no logic," making Binelli one of the few to master such an instrument. Música Viva was directed by Latin American conductor Sergio Bernal.

Bernal directs USU's symphony orchestra. He studied in the Yale University/Affiliate Artists Conducting Program and holds music degrees from Queens College and the University of Michigan.

His outreach concerts, such as last night's, are designed to increase the players' performance opportunities and enhance the recruitment efforts of USU's music department. The concert was sponsored by USU's music department and made for an entertaining and culturally diverse evening.

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