NEW YORK.- The Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz is this special guest season of the Carnegie Hall of New York. Like many other great temples of the music in USAthe centenary institution has made a commitment to attract new talents from around the world to capture new audiences.
Considered as one of the “most talented composers in the world” by the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel, Ortiz released a new composition on Saturday, “Liquid City” in Carnegie.
And within the framework of its residence for the 2024-2025 season at the New York institution, this Monday has invited new Latin American talents, including Colombian Carolina Noguera, which will premiere a work commanded by Carnegie.
For someone who does not live in the United States, who is a woman and Mexican, “this residence has meant recognition of a great effort, because it has not been easy to open doors internationally,” Ortiz tells AFP on the phone.
The “orchestras in the United States are much more inclusive” says this teacher and composer who has done her training in the best European academies at the scholarship. And he hopes that they remain in the new political context with the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
“Music goes much further (of politics). It is a universal language that has a cultural context that makes it diverse,” he says. “Beethoven belongs to me and a German,” he illustrates.
Talking “of a single school today is impossible. The 21st century is defined by a diversity of languages,” he rivets.
Political load
And for the diversity of messages. “My music has a very strong political burden and I am interested in talking about climate change, feminism, migration, racism, globalization and what happens in the world.”
The 60 -year -old Mexican has even composed a ballet about violence against women in Mexico or a piece inspired by an African revolutionary leader.
Ortiz inaugurated his collaboration with Carnegie in October with three pieces, a rope concert with the violinist Alisa Weilerstein, who inaugurated the Celebrating Latin Culture in the US program, and another with the also violinist María Dueñas, the young Spanish prodigy, with the that has collaborated several times.
Gustavo Dudamel has been his great promoter. He has made eight orders to Ortiz and has taken his music for Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris or Berlin, where the Berlin Philharmonic played music from a Latin American for the first time in 141 years of history.
“A composer learns when he listens to his well -touched music. For me it has been something essential to learn from the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” he says.
With Dudamel he has also recorded an album that has four Grammy nominations, he recalls.
On the next June, another of the greats, the director of the New York Opera Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will direct another work of this daughter of Mexican folklore musicians in Carnegie.
Voice of change
“The first time we heard a piece for violin and orchestra that (Ortiz) composed for the philharmonic of Los Angeles and María Dueñas (…) the original struck their music and how it creates this unique world,” he tells The AFP Liz Mahler, of the Carnegie artistic team.
“It was like discovering a new planet (…) and that we were all discovering this together,” he tells AFP. Mahler refers to rope altar, a commission of the Angelina Philharmonic.
“I would say that the challenge of contemporary music for the most familiar public with traditional classical music that responds to a predictable structure is that (…) it has to absorb the piece that listens for the first time, without that structure or without knowing What will be the musical language, “he adds.
Ortiz has emerged as a prominent voice of change in classical music, “a field centered for too long on European teachers,” the New York Times wrote last year.
A need made virtue because, given the aging of the audiences, many concert halls and especially directors such as Dudamel, who will direct the New York Philharmonic from the 2026-2027 season, bet on democratizing music as a transforming tool for young people and society.