With a brand new album, prestigious residencies and a star conductor championing her music, Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz is lastly getting the popularity she deserves.
Marta Arteaga
cover caption
toggle caption
Marta Arteaga
At age 60, 4 a long time into her profession, Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz has arrived. Final 12 months she launched Revolución Diamantina, a wide ranging album recorded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel. It gained Ortiz three Grammys in February.
Now, the identical forces return for Yanga, one other arresting recording of Ortiz’s orchestral music that showcases her signature brilliant colours, vivacious rhythms, tuneful melodies and daring concepts. The album is so good it simply may ship a number of extra awards to her shelf.
The anchoring work on Yanga is a brand new cello concerto tailor made for Alisa Weilerstein, who premiered the piece final fall and performs it right here with fearless conviction. The concerto’s title, Dzonot, is the Mayan phrase for the huge underground caves and cisterns present in Mexico’s verdant Yucatan Peninsula. Within the opening motion, “Luz Vertical,” you possibly can hear the second when a shaft of sunshine strikes deep right into a cave, glittering on the water, due to Ortiz’s translucent mixture of winds dancing with harp, piano, celesta and the ping of crotales.
YouTube
In Dzonot, Ortiz illustrates the vibrancy of the Yucatan’s pure splendor, but in addition the risk it faces from vacationer growth. Within the motion titled “Jade,” a menacing orchestra roils mechanically, like a machine gobbling up the panorama. In “El Ojo de Jaguar,” an homage to the endangered Mexican jaguar, the rhythms are lither. Ortiz breaks out head-bobbing grooves, using among the 29 percussion devices within the rating, whereas instructing Weilerstein to whip up cyclones of jagged bow strokes.
In the perfect of all attainable worlds, Dzonot would shortly enter the cello concerto repertoire. However like a lot of Ortiz’s latest orchestral music, it is not a easy rating to tug off. Nonetheless, an growing variety of Ortiz’s almost 100 compositions are receiving performances as she lastly will get lengthy overdue visibility. She simply completed a season as Carnegie Corridor’s resident composer and has moved on to the identical place with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. It additionally helps to have champions of your music. Ortiz has these fabulously intuitive performances led by star conductor Dudamel, who describes her as one of the proficient composers on this planet.
Rising up in Mexico Metropolis, Ortiz was surrounded by people music. Her mother and father performed within the celebrated Latin American band Los Folkloristas, which incessantly held rehearsals of their basement crammed with people devices. Ortiz pays homage to the music on the brand new album, particularly to Violeta Parra, who pioneered the socially aware “Nueva Canción” motion and died by her personal hand in 1967. Six Items for Violeta brings out a extra somber facet of Ortiz. The opening motion, “Preludio Andino,” begins with a meandering piano, braided with mysterious strings. “Canto del Agelito” unfolds a Bartok-flavored theme for violin and unnerving, shifting strings, whereas a low, tolling piano haunts “Amen,” the ultimate part.
Yanga reunites composer Gabriela Ortiz with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Their 2024 album Revolución Diamantina gained three Grammy awards earlier this 12 months.
cover caption
toggle caption
If Dzonot is anxious with Mexico’s biodiversity, Yanga, the title observe, engages with the nation’s cultural historical past. The work tells the story of Gaspar Yanga, an actual life sixteenth century African prince, dropped at Mexico as a slave. After his escape, Yanga spent 30 years as a fugitive and a preeminent Robin Hood determine who lastly turned, as Ortiz places it within the album liner notes, “the primary Black ruler in America.”
The work is a show-stopping spectacle for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Mexican percussion ensemble Tambuco and the Los Angeles Grasp Chorale, who sings each in Spanish and a dialect from the Congo. Ortiz exploits the refrain virtually as one other percussion instrument, buying and selling polyrhythmic beats with the Tambuco gamers on a wide range of Afro-Latin devices together with batá drums, shekeres, caxixi and guiros.
This music, for Ortiz, is a shout out to equality and freedom, concepts the composer is aware of properly, having earned her hard-won success. With this excellent new album, and the Grammy winner from final 12 months, it is time for the world to lastly catch as much as the extraordinary music of Gabriela Ortiz.