Gabriela montero rachmaninov biography
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One day when she was fifteen months old, her parents noticed she was picking out a familiar tune on the little piano. Three months later, before she could even speak, she had picked out by herself the entire melody of the National Anthem. It is my emotional response to the loss of Venezuela herself to lawlessness, corruption, chaos and rates of murder among the highest in the world.
The opening chord is intended to jolt the public from silence and apathy.
Such is the pace of the musician’s life today that combining the two roles has inevitably become impossible. Thanks, in large part, to the private encouragement of the great Martha Argerich, improvisation is a prominent element of my performing life today.
In 2011, the time came to write something down, to compose my official Opus 1.
Then Martha Argerich overheard me improvising one day and was ecstatic. A Soldier’s Tale, the work for narrator and chamber orchestra that soon followed, makes its point forcefully enough: the soldier’s march is not glorious but a distorted, almost comic one; the dances featured in the music are Western, not Russian; and the plot acidly tells of the soldier gullibly selling his fiddle to the Devil in return for a book that he does not understand but, the Devil assures him, will bring him
great wealth.
If Stravinsky’s message was delivered subtly through his music, Nicolas Nabokov’s was done bluntly and in person.
Her solo discography includes four solo albums on the EMI/Warner label, and two orchestral albums on the Orchid Classics label.
gabrielamontero.com
Musical America’s 2019 Conductor of the Year, Carlos Miguel Prieto is known for his charismatic conducting and dynamic, expressive interpretations, which have led to major engagements and popular acclaim throughout North America, Europe and beyond.
A passionate proponent of music education, Prieto has served as Principal Conductor of The Orchestra of the Americas from its inception in 2002, and was named Music Director in 2011.
Her most recent album (2015) - featuring her own composition for piano and orchestra "Ex Patria", Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No.2, and 3 freestyle improvisations - won the Grammy for Best Classical Album at the 2015 Latin Grammy Awards. In 1943 he wrote his symphonic poem Memorial to Lidice, marking the fate of a Czech village that was razed to the ground and its people massacred on Hitler’s orders – the quotes of the Czech St Wenceslas Choral and, pointedly, the “destiny” motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are no accident.
A quote from Beethoven’s Fifth also appears in the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte for string quartet, piano and voice, written in 1942 by another composer in exile in the US, Arnold Schoenberg.
As someone who both composed and performed at the highest level, he was something of a dying breed too.
Composers have, of course, been performing their own works since the likes of Byrd and Dowland sat down with their virginals and lutes in the 16th century. One assumes, on the other hand, that Roberto Gerhard – a Catalan composer who moved to England in light of the suppression of his music in Spain – must have approved wholeheartedly.
And then, of course, there were the Russian composers, faced first with the restrictions of Communist rule and then the terror of Stalinism.
Dedicated to the 19,336 victims of homicide in 2011, it is a polemical tone poem, an unapologetic vision of Venezuela’s accelerating civic collapse and moral decay, manifested by a further 21,692 homicides in 2012, and 24,763 in 2013.
I premiered Ex Patria on October 20th, 2011, in Nuremberg, with Maestro Patrick Lange and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.
I am not a politician. In 2007, ECHO Preis awarded her the Klassik-ohne-Grenzen Award for her Bach and Beyond CD. In 2009, her album Baroque was nominated for a Grammy Award in two categories (Best Crossover Category and Best Producer Category). De Falla’s move was a notably pointed one, as Franco had been courting this most Spanish of all composers to serve as the country’s national composer.
Many revealed their feelings in music, often powerfully so.
It is in the 20th century that we find the most notably outspoken composer exiles – unsurprisingly so, given that this was the century that hosted not only some of history’s most notoriously abhorrent regimes in some countries, but also unprecedented freedom of speech and means of expressing it in others.
Nor does today’s neatly bracketed, conveniently labelled world seem that comfortable with those who multi-task: composers should compose, players should play.
Thankfully, Gabriela Montero bucks the trend. It is my nation’s story.