In anticipation of their all-Miguel del Aguila CD "Salón Buenos Aires," Camerata San Antonio, led by Kenneth Freudigman (right), presented a concert of del Aguila's CD in San Antonio and Austin in December 2007. This CD, the first all-del Aguila disk, offers a range of the composer's chamber music, from the 1994 string quartet Presto II to the 2006 work Charango Capricioso for string quartet and piano 4-hands. Mike Greenberg's concert review in the San Antonio Star-Ledger follows.

Miguel del Aguila’s music, the subject of an entire Camerata San Antonio concert Sunday in Travis Park United Methodist Church, is rather like an étagère crowded with souvenirs of the composer’s earlier and present lives and, one suspects, his loves and losses.

He was born and reared in Uruguay, studied in San Francisco, continued his studies and worked as an accompanist at the Staatsoper in Vienna, and then settled in Southern California. One can hear traces of all those places jostling each other in Aguila’s music – the intricate folk rhythms of Latin America, the repeating patterns of West Coast minimalism, the theatricality of European opera, the pop sensibility of Los Angeles.

It takes a considerable effort of intellectual abstraction and compositional skill to combine all those influences into an internally consistent unity, as Aguila generally does, but at the same time his music is deeply personal, a record of human sentiment that can be achingly poignant or raucously funny.

Camerata’s program opened with broad levity, sort of: Presto II for string quartet mixes elements of ragtime, tango and overstuffed salon music. Its hiccupping rhythmic byplay is delightful. But the piece darkens briefly near the end, and the craft is serious all the way through, in the intricate scoring and in the virtuosity demanded of the players.

The most memorable music was Clocks, for piano and string quartet. Its six movements are highly imagistic, portraying the tick-tocks, whirring gears and chimes of various clocks – many at once, but deliciously out of phase, in "Shelves Full of Clocks"; two of very different character in the poignant "Romance of the Swiss Clock and the Old Clock." "Midnight Strikes" with ominous low chimes, leading into "Old Clock’s Story," told movingly by the viola, with harmonic support by the piano, over clock sounds on the other strings.

Charango Capriccioso, for piano four hands (two of them sometimes strumming the strings directly) and string quintet, opened with a skittering piano solo leading to lovely bird-call atmospherics, which dissolved into broad, richly harmonized melody recalling Dvorak. A lively dance occupies the middle, and then the broad melody returns.

The middle movement of Salon Buenos Aires, for a mixed sextet, was astonishing for the way Aguila assembles little repeating cells into a tender melody.

Life is a Dream for string quartet and narrator (reading a passage from Calderón's classic play) opened with an elaborate, mysterious violin solo line played gorgeously by Ertan Torgul from behind the acoustical shell. (When he emerged at last and took his seat, violist Emily Watkins Freudigman rose and dashed backstage, heels clicking on the marble floor, and reappeared a few moments later with a sheet of music, which she placed on Torgul’s stand just in time, it seemed.) The performances were generally excellent, though Presto II could have been tighter and Bryn James’s reading from Calderon, in English translation, didn’t convey the magic or the music in the words.