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SUMMER SERENADES. Spanish folk songs and music by de Falla, Rodrigo, Debussy, Ravel and others. Jacques Despres, music director and pianist. Saturday night, Staller Center, State University at Stony Brook. A FOLK SONG is a fragile thing, as Summer Serenades' opening program of Spanish, pseudo-Spanish and South-American pieces made clear. The concert featured an international clutch of composers who lifted music from various Latin folk traditions, in most cases only to crush it with patriotic sentimentality.
Both the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and the Spanish poet (and amateur pianist) Federico Garcia Lorca had a light enough touch and sufficient respect for their sources not to gussy them up. The evening began brightly with a set of folk songs Lorca transcribed from a recording he made in 1931, and should have ended with de Falla's delicate arrangements of traditional...