The idea for this program came to me last spring when I was having tea with the two singers in tonight’s cast, Shelén Hughes Camacho and Joseph Parrish. While pursuing independent careers on the world’s concert halls and opera houses, spanning from Carnegie Hall (Joseph, two weeks ago) to Opera Frankfurt (Shelén, this past April), they remain steadfast partners both in life and onstage. One of the places they have recently collaborated is Voices for Bolivia, Shelén’s international non-profit organization that brings classical music to impoverished communities in her home country. I have shared the stage very happily with both of these beautiful artists, and wanted to open our 38^th season with the glow of their music. It seems especially appropriate to celebrate Latino culture right now, as the current crop of governmental hate-mongers sniff out yet a new group to victimize. I recall the passionate words of Leonard Bernstein: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly, than ever before.” That is our watchword for tonight—and for all time.

The opening three pieces take us on a deep dive into each singer’s musical culture, beginning with Moisés Moleiro’s “Joropo.” I discovered it the modern way, when YouTube served up a video of the piece in the wake of some other Latin American song I had asked to hear. The minute I encountered Moleiro’s music I knew it would be our overture. Moleiro (1904-1979) was one of Venezuela’s leading composers and professors in the twentieth century, and this is probably his most famous composition, a vigorous piece that drives the joropo to its apotheosis. A folk dance popular in Venezuela and Colombia based on Afro-Creole rhythms, the joropo uses syncopated rhythmic drive to drive dancers—and listeners—into a frenzy.

Eduardo Caba’s “Flor de bronce” immerses us in Bolivia’s countryside with a song that draws on indigenous themes and modes. The “flor de bronce,” or bronze flower, is a nickname for the kantuta, Bolivia’s national flower, and it carries deep symbolic meaning in Andean culture. The image of “bronze” suggests something that never withers, timeless and resilient like the spirit of the Bolivian people. The kantuta’s tricolor blooms are the same color as the stripes in the Bolivian flag: red for the blood of those who fought for independence, yellow for the minerals in the soil, and green for its fertile land. Its arrival in the spring has a special significance for the inhabitants of the countryside, triggering their harvest celebrations. While Eduardo Caba (1890-1953) was not an ethnomusicologist in the scholarly sense, much of his music draws on the native sounds he heard as a youth, surrounded by the music and dances of Bolivia’s indigenous people. They became his lifelong inspiration.

Joseph Parrish has profound roots in the church; his grandparents were preachers, as are both of his parents. So it is fitting that he represents his America with the spiritual “Honor, Honor,” in the setting by Hall Johnson (1888-1970). Johnson had an illustrious musical resumé: Juilliard-trained, he honed his skills with James Reese Europe and Will Marion Cook, two black superstars of early 20th century music. Johnson went on to form the hugely successful Hall Johnson choir, taking Hollywood and Broadway by storm. Johnson also had a sideline as a voice coach—both Marian Anderson and Shirley Verrett sought him out as a teacher.

It was no doubt at the instigation of the singers in his studio that he turned his hand to piano-and-voice arrangements of Negro spirituals, building on the legacy of Harry T. Burleigh, the first to write down and publish these songs. Hall Johnson took the spiritual from Burleigh’s sober simplicity to a new level of rich exuberance, adding sexy jazz harmonies and gospel drive into the mix.

Hall Johnson also launches the next section of the program: four songs about work. With the deftest of touches and a patrician command of musical spacing, Johnson evokes an entire world in his setting of Langston Hughes’s “On the Dusty Road.” Marian Anderson described it best: “Hall Johnson was a unique genius. For although he invented no new harmonies, designed no new forms, originated no new melodic styles, discovered no new rhythmic principles, he was yet able to fashion a whole new world of music in his own image.”

Stoic dignity gives way to manic Latin energy in Ernani Braga’s “Engenho novo!” from his “Five Folksongs from Northeastern Brazil.” The field laborers are jumping for joy because their new farm equipment is such an improvement—they practically killed themselves by jumping off a wall, priests are on their knees thanking God for the new machine. The Afro-Brazilian dialect of the lyric spurs Braga (1888-1948) to dig into African rhythms, creating two and half minutes of pure musical elation—a samba danced after seven cups of coffee.

The protagonist of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s “Viola quebrada” is the exact opposite of the hyperactive farm workers in “Engenho novo!.” His dilemma is something I can relate to: he’s a musician, a guitarist, who (in his view) justifies his place in the universe by creating beauty. His girlfriend Maroca sees it differently, saying that she’ll leave him unless he gets a real job. The composer labels the song a “Modinha from M. de A.” M. de A. refers to the northeastern state of Maranhão, and a modinha is a lyrical Brazilian ballad that came to the fore in the 1800s. Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) decorates this old-fashioned tune with his signature sonorities–colorful slashes of dissonance and punchy rhythm, before melting into a refrain of heart-stopping beauty.

No song program about South America would be complete without a contribution from Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000). His legacy of over 200 published canciones is a gift to song mavens, and there also appears to be a sizeable stash of unpublished works. For many years he lived a reclusive life just outside Buenos Aires, producing music whose simple grace and immediate accessibility go straight to the heart. The musical trends of his time were pushing most of his contemporaries into writing discordant atonal music, but Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone school had little appeal for Guastavino. This “Schubert of the Pampas” wanted to be an artist of the people, claiming that traditional harmony “had good results for Bach, Schumann, and Mozart.” ”Mi viña de Chapanay” celebrates a wine region in Mendoza, famous for its artisanal Malbecs. Guastavino’s enthusiastic music radiates pure bliss, a spray of sunshine and harmony with the earth.

Gershwin’s “Promenade” ushers in a trio of songs about travel. It comes from the movie Shall We Dance, where it was played by the legendary clarinetist Jimmy Dorsey and his band. It underscores the scene where Fred Astaire is trying (as always) to get the attention of the ever-disdainful Ginger Rogers. They are aboard a ship, and Astaire bribes another passenger to borrow his Great Dane so that he can join Rogers as she is walking her Cairn terrier. The ploy fails, of course—after all, their onscreen antipathy is the motor that keeps the plot rolling forward. But the music is vintage Gershwin, written at the very end of his brief life. His ability to blend insouciance and melancholy gives this clever little piece an unexpected richness.

Bob Telson’s name may not be familiar to you, but you might have heard his music in the theater (The Gospel at Colonus, Chronicle of a Death Foretold), at the ballet (Twyla Tharp’s Sextet), on CDs crooned by Natalie Cole, Barbra Streisand, and Caetano Veloso, or—most likely—at the movies, where he has supplied scores for American, Argentinean, and European films. His theme song for Bagdad Café, “Calling You,” won him a nomination for an Academy Award. Its haunting beauty has become a calling card for this versatile composer, a dazzling expert in multinational musical styles.

A more effusive kind of melancholy is the hallmark of “Caminito,” by the composer Julián Aguirre (1868-1924), one of the earliest pioneers of Argentine nationalism. He’s most famous for his many piano pieces inspired by the folk melodies of the gauchos. His music springs off the page like a spontaneous improvisation, revealing an intimate inner world in just a few short pages. Aguirre did not write many songs, but “Caminito” is a classic, imbued with a uniquely Argentinean quality of longing, memory, and love. Like so much of the music from that country, “Caminito” makes me acutely nostalgic for a place I have never even seen.

It seems there is no escaping the battle of the sexes, as we hear in four songs from North and South America. We lead off with a true rarity, “Your Technique,” with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ann Ronell. Having played so much Kurt Weill in my career, I was shocked to hear this song for the first time a month ago. It was first published in 2002, 52 years after Weill’s death. In the foreword to the song album in which it appears (Unsung Weill), the editor admits that no one has been able to figure out when or why “Your Technique” was written—an anomaly in the oeuvre of this composer, whose every note has been studied and annotated by the Kurt Weill Foundation. In the late 1920s, Ronell (née Rosenblatt) became one of the first successful female composers and lyricists. “Willow Weep for Me” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf” are her most famous tunes. A Gershwin protégée, Ronell went on to a successful career on Broadway and in Hollywood. It was there that she collaborated with Kurt Weill on two movies, The River is Blue (1937) and the screen adaptation of One Touch of Venus (1948). At some unknown point along the way Ronell and Weill created the subtle, moody blues of “Your Technique,” whose indecisive tonality (what key is this song actually in?) is a perfect musical illustration of the character’s mix of objectivity and sexual compulsion.

Women can manipulate men; and men can manipulate women. In “Your Technique” the man capitulates, even after he understands how he is being played. In Bernstein’s “A Julia de Burgos,” the woman sees herself as a dual personality: the compliant, traditional wife, and the independent, creative fireball—her true self. The song comes from Leonard Bernstein’s bicentennial cantata Songfest, perhaps his greatest vocal work. I know of no greater hymn to the visionary power of women than Julia de Burgos’ manifesto, in which she separates herself from the submissive role she is expected to play in society and creates a version of herself that flies free and unfettered to the heavens. Bernstein matches her passionate lines with a bravura setting, capped by one of the most thrilling climaxes in all of art song. Though written in Spanish, it falls into the North America trove—Julia de Burgos lived in New York, and came from Puerto Rico. (Though the ever-shifting, driving rhythms are perhaps more redolent of Spain than the poet’s native land.)

Leave it to a Brazilian composer to turn hurt feelings into irresistible seduction. Such is the magic of Claudio Santoro’s little samba, “Luar de meu bem.” Santoro (1919-1989) led a distinguished career as a composer, teacher, conductor, and administrator. Since I first encountered him on baritone Paulo Szót’s double-CD album of his songs and piano pieces, it came as something of a shock to read that Santoro was best known for his large-scale instrumental music, including fourteen symphonies and seven string quartets. Santoro’s international career as a conductor made him a spokesperson for classical music of his home country, whisking him from Bonn to Moscow, Paris to Bucharest. His songs run the gamut from romantic to rhythmic, gravitating to a warm, dense tonal palette. Little wonder that Szót called his album “Nocturnal garden,” an apt image for the rich fragrance of Santoro’s harmonic world.

The zesty “Cancíon del beso robado” concludes the group of love songs with a burst of joy. When I first programmed the song in 2007, it took me two solid weeks and a wild goose chase to find the music; eighteen years later, it was a click away on Scribd, in a far more legible copy. In 2007, it was not yet clear who actually had composed the song; Marlena Kuss, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Texas was unsure. “The attribution to Ginastera is very dubious for musical and codicological reasons,” she wrote at the time. Since then, Ms. Kuss located the manuscript and finally was able to list the song in Ginastera’s official catalog. While this composer is best known for his gnarly 12-tone works like the opera Bomarzo, his early music gravitated to a folkloric style. That would explain the propulsive charm of “La canción del beso robado,” written in the distinctive rhythm of an Argentine chacarera. Its distinctive combination of 6/8 and ¾ rhythm is like dancing a tarantella and a waltz in constant alternation.

South American culture is dance culture. But while we North Americans no longer can claim anything with as deep roots as tango—or salsa—or samba, we have had our moments. There was the Twist craze. The Charleston. The Lindy Hop. And many of us grew up with the square dance, one of whose precursors was the Scottish reel. Both were danced to fiddle accompaniments, and they share some of the same steps. “Uncle Joe’s Reel” is one of many American and Canadian folk songs set by Celius Dougherty (1902-1986), who was a prolific composer of over 200 songs as well as the accompanist for some of the legendary singers of his time (Marian Anderson, Alexander Kipnis). You can hear Dougherty’s expertise as a pianist in the harmonic and rhythmic imagination of his arrangements and folk songs—“Uncle Joe” is full of bewitching surprises, along with a few knuckle-busting moments. Dougherty is one of the hidden gems of American song, a composer due for a revival.

Shelén Hughes Camacho introduced me to a song from her home country, Bolivia: a cueca called “Cantarina,” by Willy Claure (b. 1962) and Milton Contez (b. 1961). Claure is a hugely popular singer-songwriter who has devoted himself to bringing the traditions of Bolivian folk music to audiences in the Americas and Europe. Like the tango, the cueca is a dance with a long, mysterious pedigree reaching back to the nineteenth century. In 1979 Augusto Pinochet declared it the national dance of Chile, but the dictatorial president couldn’t claim it as his country’s exclusive property—Peru and Bolivia also call it their own. About “Cantarina,” Shelén explained: “This is a beautiful and special piece, It is a traditional courtship dance in Bolivian folk tradition. I used to perform this all over the world as a Bolivian folk dancer before I sang!”

I could never do a program about South America without including at least one song by Carlos López Buchardo (1881-1948). My soul vibrates to his musical ebullience and opulent harmonies. “Copla criolla” is set to a folk poem and draws on typically Argentinean dance rhythms—especially the alternation of ¾ time and 6/8 time that we heard in the Ginastera song, and that Leonard Bernstein later used when he wrote the song “America” for West Side Story. While he is often described as a nationalist composer, López Buchardo completed his musical studies in Paris, and the resulting combination of super-saturated Argentine melody and sexy French chord structures gives his songs their special magic.

I am grateful to Shelén and Joseph—and the indispensable Amir Farid—for sharing their musical worlds with me. Everyone brought a dish to tonight’s concert, and the resulting buffet is a beauty. Dig in—there’s more where that came from.

South America, North America: A Love Story will be performed in Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center (129 W 67th St, NYC) on Thursday, November 20 at 8PM. More info.