Program Notes: Park, Ortiz and Prokofiev

STARTING WITH A TOUR

Bortolameolli is a champion of both contemporary composers heard on the program’s first half. The first of them, Venezuelan-Chilean Miguel Farías, composed his Retratos Australes (“Southern Portraits” in Spanish, referencing the southernmost region of South America) for the National Youth Orchestra of Chile’s July 2019 tour to Africa and Europe under conductor Maximiano Valdés—a trip highlighted by the ensemble’s debut at Berlin’s Konzerthaus. Bortolameolli, who led the work’s U.S. premiere with the Kansas City Symphony in November 2023, has also commissioned another piece by Farías, Estallido, and conducted that music’s world premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in March 2023.

Farías has composed music on even grander scales—including two operas—and is known for exploring connections between music, literature, society and politics. He is also a writer himself, and his debut novel Plástico was released last year. His upcoming musical projects include a commissioned song cycle for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel, a commission for the Simón Bolívar Chamber Orchestra and a new work for the New York City-based loadbang ensemble. An active educator, he is an associate professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

THE MUSIC: BRILLIANT SHIFTING COLORS

Kansas City Symphony program annotator Eric T. Williams offers the following description of Retratos Australes’ three movements:

TIRANA. “Tirana opens with a series of three rapid chords punctuating intervals of rhythmically complex rumblings. Unsettled and verging on
chaotic, the music morphs into a driving march that builds to a hypnotic climax. Flute and tambourine flicker and dim as the movement concludes.”

MINGA. “Minga opens with low string glissandi (slides) against the backdrop of flute flutter-tonguing in a deep register. Various sound worlds drift in and out of focus, connected by the incessant glissandi. Eventually, the music recedes in the distance to nothingness.”

CHINCHINERO. “Chinchinero is named after urban street performers in Chile who wear drums and cymbals on their back and play them while performing acrobatic dance moves. Farías evokes the namesake with orchestral percussion and portrays athleticism with undulating figures tossed about the ensemble. The music drifts into a dream-like state as purposeful melodies collide, the sound ricocheting about. A waltz rhythm emerges with cascading scales rigidly ornamenting the pulse. The intensity builds to a resounding chord, and the piece ends as a ringing triangle note lingers in the air.”

Program note by Carl Schroeder, with musical description by Eric T. Williams.

MEXICO THROUGH THE COMPOSER’S LENS

MUDEJAR CHILANGO. For Altar de Cuerda, Ortiz chose the traditional concerto structure of three movements, ordered fast-slow-fast. In the first, Mudejar Chilango (Chilango Moorish, where “Chilango” is a moniker for Mexico City natives), the composer included subtle melodic turns which impart a vaguely Mediterranean flavor, a nod to Dueñas’ Andalusian roots. This movement is related to another 2021 work by Ortiz, D’Colonial Californiano for flute and orchestra, in which the composer alludes to cultural hybridization and unstable borders. More generally, Mudejar Chilango represents one more of Ortiz’s visions on cultural appropriation and reappropriation, an important theme in her musical thought. (Ortiz herself is, by the way, proudly Chilanga.)

CANTO ABIERTO. In Canto Abierto (Open Song), the movement’s title references the open chapels that were a common feature in 16th-century Mexican churches, built to catechize Indigenous communities still reluctant to go inside a temple. Here, the composer’s operating principle is the creation of chords that are built and deconstructed, harmonies that slowly grow and contract like a sea swell that can be visually perceived in the score, while the solo violin lyrically floats over the sound waves. At the beginning and at the end of the movement, both woodwind and brass play tuned crystal glasses which create an additional harmonic field.

MAYA-DECO. In Maya-Deco, references are more abstract than those in Mudejar Chilango. This is a virtuosic, very rhythmic and fast movement, with a constant dialogue between the solo violin and the orchestra; near the end there is a fully written cadenza for the soloist. In this movement the composer alludes again, as if in passing, to the American imitations of Mexican cultural icons with results that are neither the one nor the other, imitations that are finally re-imported into Mexico.

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Gabriela Ortiz’s music incorporates seemingly disparate musical worlds, ranging from traditional and popular idioms to avant-garde techniques and multimedia works. Her music has been performed by prestigious orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra.

At this year’s Grammy Awards on February 2, 2025, Ortiz’s music was nominated for four Grammys and won three, in the categories of Best Orchestral Performance, Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Best Classical Compendium. In 2022 Ortiz received the Bellas Artes Gold Medal, the highest distinction granted by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts. Her other awards include the National Prize for Arts and Literature, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship and two Latin Grammy nominations. She teaches composition at Mexico’s National Autonomous University. 

Excerpted from a program note by Juan Arturo Brennan, with biography contribution from Ana Alonso Minutti.

History has not borne out this lofty self-assessment. Prokofiev is best known today for his brilliant concertos, thrilling symphonies and evocative ballet music, but the lack of public and commercial success in the opera house during his lifetime never deterred the composer from undertaking successive passion projects—though they must have given him more grief than satisfaction. Chief among these were the 11 years Prokofiev spent on his epic setting of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1941-1952), and the years he worked on The Fiery Angel (1919-1927). Neither opera was fully staged during the composer’s lifetime.

SYMPHONIC ECHOES OF AN OPERA

The Fiery Angel tells a convoluted, psychologically complex story involving nuns, mysterious visions, demonic possession and a love story of sorts. It all ends badly. Despite failing to find a company willing to produce the opera, Prokofiev felt the music he had written was some of his finest. When a sympathetic friend suggested he use material from the languishing opera as the basis of a symphony, Prokofiev initially hesitated; he was worried about what critics would say about his artistic “recycling.” But the composer’s belief in the innate quality of his musical ideas won out, and he began writing the new symphony. The completed work was premiered in May 1929 by the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris under the baton of Pierre Monteux.

Although his Third Symphony shares the opera’s dark tone, Prokofiev does not try to tell the story in instrumental terms. His themes do not appear in the order they are presented in the opera, and the musical development is unrelated to the plot. The composer considered the new work to be “one of my most significant compositions,” and said the public should listen to it “just like any other symphony without a program.”

The symphony calls for a large orchestra and is cast in four movements. A noisy and energetic first movement is followed by a contrasting slow movement filled with lyrical melodies shared around the orchestra. The third movement is a concise three-part form with frenetic up-tempo music surrounding a central section of relative calm. An epic finale, which references music from the first movement, rounds off this dramatic work.

This week’s performances of the Third Symphony are a rarity—in fact, they are the Minnesota Orchestra’s first-ever rendition of the symphony at Orchestra Hall, as the ensemble’s most recent performance came in March 1968 at Northrop Auditorium.

Program note © Jeffrey Stirling.