Glitter!

Tonight Gabriela Ortiz’s Revolución diamantina comes to the Proms! Last year I was bowled over by her violin concerto, Altar de cuerda, when its dedicatee Maria Dueñas performed it at the Barbican with the LA Phil and Dudamel; since then I’ve been trying to explore her music more extensively.

UPDATE: I will be live on Radio 3 in the Prom interval (at rather short notice), talking about this incredible composer.

I’m thrilled by the scale of her imagination and the grittiness of the issues she is moved to write about with so much intensity: there’s a depth, breadth and all-embracing range that allows her to draw in everything from Rite of Spring harmonies and Adams-esque propulsion and drive, to the rhythms and contours of Mexican folk music and the legends that underpin it.

Britain too has fed her music; she undertook postgraduate study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Robert Saxton and later a PhD at City University, while London gave her the opportunity to hear such composers as Lutosławski and Takemitsu conducting their own works.

She can swing from avant-garde to filmic in the blink of an eye, while the opulence and dark brilliance of her textures give her music an almost multi-dimensional quality. In short, she has a voice unlike any other I’ve heard, and when the Proms announced that the LA Phil/Dudamel were bringing perhaps her magnumest of opuses so far, my number one choice for covering the season was to ask for an interview with her.

Revolucion diamantina is based on the huge protests in Mexico that took place after a teenager was raped by a police officer and the authorities were sluggish about response. The name, ‘Glitter Revolution’, came about when women protestors threw pink glitter over the chief of police. Glitter has been a symbol of protest there ever since.

Ortiz’s ballet is in six acts (or movements, in concert) and involves a giant orchestra and eight amplified singers, representing the protestors. As things evolve, she told me, some performances are looking at expanding the sung element into a larger chorus; and the work has been performed as an actual ballet, recently in Mexico City - where it appears to have clashed in some way with the erecting of a big screen outside the opera house for the upcoming England-Mexico football match.

Here’s a taster - this is the ‘Pink Glitter’ movement.

I was lucky enough to speak to her for an hour a few weeks ago and the interview appeared in the Sunday Times the other day. You can read the whole thing here (paywall). A few choice extracts:

Becoming a composer in the 1980s was no easy matter. “Any young composer struggles,” Ortiz says, “but being a Latin American woman I think made it even harder.” A sole visit to Darmstadt, the summer school associated with avant-garde composition, quickly proved that this was not to be her world. “I felt so different. I felt that I couldn’t belong to that culture, to that aesthetic. Everyone was interested in timbre, texture and extended techniques, which was interesting, but not the only thing. Everybody was avoiding rhythm and pulse — all the things that for me were essential and were part of my voice. So it was hard. It was really, really hard. Not only the fact that I was a woman, but also the fact that I came from a totally different culture.”

…

Ortiz hesitates to describe herself as a political composer, since she writes numerous abstract works; but over time her involvement with the burning issues of today has deepened. The cello concerto Dzonot (Abyss) draws deeply on Mayan legend about the spirit world and the source of life; this is Ortiz’s plea for the preservation of ancient ecosystems in the face of the climate catastrophe.

“Today,” she says, “I think any art is political. Silence is also a political statement. In recent years I have been touched by many things happening now; I’m a political composer in that I want to speak about things that affect me.”

The Prom is tonight, 12 August, at 7pm and the companion piece is nothing less than Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. You can hear it live on BBC Radio 3 and afterwards on Sounds. I’ll be there. I am keen to experience this hard-hitting work up close and live.