By Jonathan Blumhofer

Conductor Robert Treviño celebrates what we might call the dawning of the North American vernacular school; composer Ethan Iverson displays his fascination with instrumental color.

Every composer should have a champion like Robert Treviño. The 40-year-old, Texas-born conductor has been busy churning out excellent recordings, several of them installments in ongoing series. The latest of those is Americascapes 2, the sequel to 2021’s Americascapes.

While the prior release examined, after a fashion, European influences on 20^th-century American composers, this one celebrates what we might call the dawning of the North American vernacular school. Much to its credit, the program isn’t limited to music from the United States.

Indeed, its biggest selection is Mexican Silvestre Revueltas’ 1940 ballet La Coronela. The composition’s back story is fantastically convoluted. Following its posthumous premiere, the sketches, score, and parts all went missing. Twenty years later, Revueltas’ colleague, Jose Limantour, reconstructed the work, though his exact sources remains unclear.

Nevertheless, what’s presented here as La Coronela is music of real vitality: taut rhythms, colorful instrumentation, spades of thematic variety. In more than a few ways, the effort recalls Petrushka, not just through its use of Stravinskian ostinatos (though there are those) but via its employment of jump cuts between traditional dance rhythms, folk-like tunes, and outright quotations—“Taps,” for instance, emerges unexpectedly in the closing “El juicio final.”

Treviño and the Basque National Orchestra have all of La Coronela’s twists and turns firmly in hand. Indeed, theirs is a terrific interpretation and performance, one that’s solidly locked into Revueltas’ bracing style. The play of atmosphere in “La pesadilla de Don Ferruco” is particularly striking.

The pairing’s feel for George Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape is likewise assured. True to its title, this 1984 effort aims, to a certain degree, to scare and, in lesser hands, its sudden, shrill outbursts can sound like they ought to be accompanying a horror movie.

But Treviño and his ensemble find moments of mystical, quasi-Brucknerian repose between the shrieks and yelps. The results are resonant and ominous, yes, but strangely affecting, too.

Evidently, Treviño worked Crumb before the composer’s death in 2022. He was also friends with George Walker, whose Address fills out the disc.

Walker’s first orchestral work, Address is meant to reference Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In its noble, stentorian phrasings, the music certainly conveys a type of oracular grandeur. But it’s hardly limited to imitating Big Statements.

Rather, Address comes across as a fully fleshed-out symphonic argument, punchy at times, reflective at others. The concluding “Dramatico” movement is exactly that: searching at the beginning, then growing in intensity and energy—as well as textural and motivic richness—to a thoroughly satisfying apex.

Treviño’s account is shapely and confident. It’s a beautiful memorial to his old friend as well as a timely reminder of the imperative to appeal to the better angels of our collective nature.

When Debussy set out to write six sonatas for various instruments near the end of his life, he was driven, in part, by a fascination with timbre and certain French Baroque-era composers. Ethan Iverson’s half-dozen Playfair Sonatas employs a similar fascination with instrumental color. It also derives from a fundamental necessity: the producer/curator Piers Playfair commissioned Iverson to write the cycle to help cover the composer’s studio rent during the pandemic.

It was a worthy investment. The instrumentation, which Playfair chose, overlaps a little bit with Debussy’s—there’s a Violin Sonata and one for trumpet (Debussy projected a sonata with trumpet, but died before he could write it)—though, for the most part, these are pieces that gleefully go their own ways.

Iverson’s activities have long straddled the divide between the classical and jazz worlds, and he’s clearly at home in both types of music. Formally, four of the sonatas follow the three-movement Classical-era structure; the Clarinet and Marimba Sonatas adhere to the more Romantic pattern of four. All but the one for alto saxophone close with a rondo. A “Fanfare” and “Recessional” incorporate all seven instruments.

Throughout, Iverson’s writing is broadly idiomatic and varied. The Violin Sonata, for instance, begins with a stately, pavane-like introduction before launching into a mix of bluesy, leanly neo-Neo-Classical, and fervently Romantic episodes. The Alto Saxophone Sonata alternates vigorous playfulness and dreamy serenity.

Among the striking moments in each sonata are the slow movements, each of which is dedicated to a different jazz artist. The tripping, totally nonchalant “Music Hall” section in the Clarinet Sonata and the smoky “Theme” in the Trumpet Sonata prove conspicuously memorable.

All of the performances, which are given by the artists for whom the sonatas were composed—violinist Miranda Cuckson, marimbaist Makoto Nakura, clarinetist Carol McGonnell, trombonist Mike Lormand, alto saxophonist Talmur Sullivan, and trumpeter Tim Leopold, all accompanied by Iverson at the piano—convey authority. Though Cuckson’s instrument gets a bit lost in the mix during the “Recessional,” the full group’s jaunty opening “Fanfare,” with its seeming echoes of a ’70s TV show theme, anticipates the roundly enjoyable aspects of what’s to come.

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.