Eduardo Mata

Although Eduardo Mata never assumed the podium of a top-tier orchestra, he devoted the bulk of his foreshortened professional life to elevating ensembles still in their formative stages. In live performances he gravitated toward Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler together with Ravel, Stravinsky, and Strauss, yet his strongest final recordings may ultimately define him as an interpreter of Spanish and Latin American repertoire. These late discs, fusing ethnic melodies and rhythms with symphonic traditions, point toward the music he favored in private: Latin American folk traditions, songs by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim, jazz, and above all bossa nova. Toward the end of his career Mata programmed Latin American—and especially Mexican—works in every city he visited, even in Germany, where audiences for such repertory were least anticipated. He nevertheless resisted being pigeonholed as a narrowly “Mexican” conductor and labored instead to join the international mainstream, an ambition that drew ironic commentary from critics during the 1980s who grouped him among faceless, interchangeable maestros.

Mata was raised in Mexico City by parents who, though not musicians themselves, valued the arts. Speaking to Gramophone in 1985, he recalled: “My father used to sing and take me to concerts; there were people like Horenstein, Sargent, and, of course, Dorati. A major figure in Mexico was Celibidache, and Markevitch was exercising a huge intellectual power as a composer and conductor. He and Chávez were great influences on me. Every time I think about them I feel sad not to have had time (or, perhaps, inclination – I grew disillusioned with the serialism I once worked with) to write any serious music for over ten years. But a composer’s way of looking at a score still remains with me.” Most of his own compositions originated in the early 1960s and never appeared in his discography. They include five symphonies (the first and second, composed in 1962 and 1963, bear the subtitles “Classical” and “Romantic”), the 1963 ballet suite Deborah, the 1963 tape ballet Los Huescos Secos, a 1960 piano sonata, a 1967 cello sonata, Trio to Vaughan Williams (1957) for clarinet, snare drum, and cello, and a set of chamber works collectively titled Improvisaciones.

Mata turned to conducting at fifteen while studying composition at the Mexican National Conservatory with Rodolfo Halftter and Pablo Moncayo. Between 1960 and 1963 he also participated in the conservatory workshop led by Carlos Chávez and Julián Orbón. A Koussevitzky Fellowship took him to Tanglewood in the summer of 1964 for conducting lessons with Erich Leinsdorf and composition classes with Gunther Schuller. He soon exchanged the composer’s desk for the conductor’s stand. In 1964 he assumed leadership of the Guadalajara Symphony Orchestra and simultaneously became head of the music department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he founded an orchestra, publicly criticized insufficient state support for music, and remained until 1976—the same year he served as principal conductor of the Mexico Casals Festival. During this period he began recording for Mexican RCA, a relationship that later proved advantageous. Although those discs stayed within Mexico, the international company invited him to London for projects that included a 1977 Revueltas album, his first entry into the American record market.

Mata had relinquished the Guadalajara post in 1970 to become principal conductor of the Phoenix Symphony, then still a part-time ensemble that nevertheless gave him an American foothold. From this base he received guest invitations from the Boston, Chicago, and Cleveland orchestras as well as from numerous European groups. Even so, he remained relatively unknown in the United States when, in 1976, he was asked to revive the financially troubled Dallas Symphony—an orchestra he had never led. The Dallas organization had previously attracted rising talents such as Antal Dorati and Georg Solti, yet its fortunes plummeted in the early 1970s; in 1974 it entered bankruptcy and suspended activity for nearly a year. Initially hesitant, Mata feared the scale of reconstruction required and hesitated to associate himself with an ensemble linked to recent failure.

Lloyd Haldeman, who became president and managing director after the near-collapse, selected Mata to restore both finances and local esteem. Haldeman regarded the young, charismatic conductor as poised for a major international career that would elevate Dallas by association. The orchestra soon resumed recording for RCA precisely because the label wished to extend its existing contract with Mata. Handsome and photogenic, Mata nevertheless encountered resistance; Dallas Morning News and Musical America critic John Ardoin questioned his suitability, arguing that a higher-profile musician should rebuild an orchestra without a full-time director since 1973. Although Mata had been active in Mexico and Europe, his New York debut had occurred only in 1975 at the Mostly Mozart Festival, leaving him little known beyond Phoenix. Ardoin found his first Dallas concert eccentric in Mozart and neutral in Mahler and judged the initial seasons uneven, claiming Mata possessed “little or no view point.”

Similar reservations surfaced nationally when critics coined the phrase “Muti-Mata-Mehta” syndrome to describe what they saw as interchangeable glamour conductors—Riccardo Muti in Philadelphia, Mata in Dallas, Zubin Mehta in New York—whose technically polished performances lacked interpretive depth. After the opening seasons, however, Mata earned credit, even from Ardoin, for instilling brilliance and cohesion; he once remarked to an interviewer, “For me, there is no such thing as over-rehearsing. There is always something that can be improved.” His personal interpretive voice developed more gradually. Early RCA recordings made in London with the music of Silvestre Revueltas and Manuel de Falla were followed, some fifteen years later for Dorian, by more vivid accounts of the same composers despite collaboration with a less prestigious Venezuelan ensemble. In the intervening period his Dallas discs of Prokofiev, Copland, Ravel, Gershwin, Holst, and others for RCA, EMI, and Pro Arte received measured praise, reviewers often focusing on digital sound quality rather than interpretive insight. His reputation outside Latin America stood highest in England, where he remained a frequent and valued guest.

A 1981 Vox recording of the Carlos Chávez symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra first revealed Mata’s affinity for rhythmically vital, nationally inflected scores—an affinity later confirmed by Dorian performances of Enescu and Ginastera. Throughout the 1980s Pro Arte and Dorian cast him and the Dallas Symphony as specialists in orchestral display pieces such as Respighi’s Pines of Rome and Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony. Mata stepped down from Dallas in 1993 after recruiting fine players, securing recording contracts, participating in the planning of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center (designed by I. M. Pei and opened in 1989), and leading the orchestra on a triumphant European tour. A London critic hailed the tour as “a preemptive bid to turn the big five orchestras in the U.S. into a big six … a testament to one of the most rapid and remarkable rises in the fortunes of any orchestra since the war.”

Still, Mata sought change. “I have been a music director somewhere every year since I was 22,” he told DSO staff member Mark Melson. “I would like a rest from the administrative duties, from the personnel decisions, and would like to be free to just make music for a while.” The separation remained cordial; the orchestra named him Conductor Emeritus for Life. On his final evening he told a radio interviewer that the orchestra’s greatest transformation lay in its self-perception: “how the orchestra feels about themselves. They are a proud bunch now. They know that they can play as well as any orchestra in the world.”

Thereafter Mata accepted posts as principal guest conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, principal guest conductor and artistic advisor of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar in Caracas, and artistic director of the Solistas de México. With the Venezuelan and Mexican groups he undertook a Dorian series devoted to Latin American music, producing incisive accounts of works by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Carlos Chávez, Alberto Ginastera, Silvestre Revueltas, Antonio Estévez, and Julián Orbón, as well as three discs centered on Manuel de Falla. While earlier European-music recordings had been competent yet detached, these performances combined precision with necessary theatricality. He also sustained ties with the Pittsburgh Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, London Symphony, Rome Radio Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic, and Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra.

On the morning of January 4, 1995, Mata and his companion Marina Anaya perished when his private plane crashed shortly after departing Cuernavaca Airport near his home in Xochitepec, south of Mexico City.