From piano to page
Gabriela Montero the composer
Gabriela Montero’s own music has featured on several of her albums. Recorded for EMI, her eponymous debut recital disc (2005) and Solatino (2010) include her improvisations alongside works by other composers. Between those, and on the same label, came Bach and Beyond (2006) and Baroque (2008), both of which consist entirely of the pianist working her improvisatory magic on the greats of the early 18th century.
In her first release for Orchid Classics in 2015, however, the pianist revealed a new string to her bow – alongside Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 was Montero’s own Opus 1: Ex Patria. Composed in 2011 and performed on a number of occasions before the recording, this 13-minute tone poem for piano and orchestra is both a haunting lament for her home country and a bitter reflection on her own status as, effectively, an exile from it.
At the time of that release, Montero had already begun work in earnest on her Piano Concerto
No. 1, the ‘Latin Concerto’, which she premiered at the Gewandhaus Leipzig with the MDR Symphony Orchestra and Kristjan Järvi in
2016. Featured on her new disc with the Orchestra of the Americas under Carlos Miguel Prieto (also on Orchid Classics), the concerto is, as the title implies, awash with South American dance rhythms
– a very different affair from the mournfulness of Ex Patria.