It’s time to take heed to the daring music of Gabriela Ortiz : NPR

At age 60, 4 many years into her profession, Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz has arrived. Final 12 months she launched Revolución Diamantina, a panoramic 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 vivid colours, vivacious rhythms, tuneful melodies and daring concepts. The album is so good it simply may ship just a few 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 may hear the second when a shaft of sunshine strikes deep right into a cave, glittering on the water, because of Ortiz’s translucent mixture of winds dancing with harp, piano, celesta and the ping of crotales.

In Dzonot, Ortiz illustrates the vibrancy of the Yucatan’s pure splendor, but in addition the risk it faces from vacationer improvement. 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 a few of the 29 percussion devices within the rating, whereas instructing Weilerstein to whip up cyclones of jagged bow strokes.

In the perfect of all doable worlds, Dzonot would shortly enter the cello concerto repertoire. However like a lot of Ortiz’s latest orchestral music, it isn’t a easy rating to drag off. Nonetheless, an growing variety of Ortiz’s practically 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 some of the proficient composers on the earth.

Rising up in Mexico Metropolis, Ortiz was surrounded by folks music. Her dad and mom performed within the celebrated Latin American band Los Folkloristas, which steadily held rehearsals of their basement crammed with folks devices. Ortiz pays homage to the music on the brand new album, particularly to Violeta Parra, who pioneered the socially acutely 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.
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If Dzonot is anxious with Mexico’s biodiversity, Yanga, the title monitor, 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 nearly as one other percussion instrument, buying and selling polyrhythmic beats with the Tambuco gamers on quite a lot 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 effectively, 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.