El Canto del Tepozteco
Premiered in May 1987 at the Guildhall Contemporary Music Festival, London, with the Guildhall Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Steuart Bedford.
Having been a flute player for many years prior to writing this work, I often felt when playing with guitar, that there was an unbalanced relationship between these two instruments as we often had to play with amplification. So in this work the string orchestra has the function of amplifying the strings of the guitar.
The piece is evocative to the village of Tepoztlán near Mexico City where I lived for a few months before I left my country and which memory I cherished many years after that.
The music makes reference to the god who is very swift in running up the very steep paths of the mountain that shelters and gives name to the town.