Leo Masliah - Cine Mudo (2019)

This album has its origin in a commission that was made last year to Leo Maslíah in Montevideo by the LAPA, Audiovisual Preservation Laboratory of the University of the Republic, for the restoration of the silent film Del pingo at the wheel. The proposal was that during the screening of the restored copy, Maslíah played his music. This was done as planned, but the album is not the exact recording of what was played on the occasion, but each piece has its full length, something that the composer explains very well in the internal text of the disc's graphics. . So the album is longer than the film, in addition to the end brings two bonus tracks whose origin were similar experiences, audiovisual.

The start of Silent Cinema, such as the name of the album, is with Alegría y juventud, a rag reminiscent of Scott Joplin, very much in tune with the proposal of musicalizing in the same theater what is being projected on the screen. Then, each number has its own style and character. With infinite sadness (track 3), halfway between the Uruguayan nationalist page and the cinema of the 1930s, it is a page of great melancholy and beauty. Although Maslíah appeals very much to the parody of styles and genres, his personal stamp is on each beat and slips into certain rhythmic irregularities, in very unexpected harmonic cadences, and in a certain ironic sense of humor that permeates several tracks of the album.

When we finish listening to the first fifteen tracks, which are the music written for Del pingo at the wheel, we have the feeling that this music is enough by itself, and that the images it evokes are possibly more interesting than those that were left in the scrolls . Finally, two more pieces of gift: Spring meeting (track 16) is, according to Masliah, "a substitute music of an episode of the old television series Dimension unknown"; and Blind Movie (17), "a summary of the music made to accompany a screening of Sherlock Junior by Buster Keaton", that is, another commission, this one from 2007.

It remains only to hope that this year we can see the film accompanied by Maslíah in Argentina, to appreciate the work as a whole.