Three Latina composers anchor this year’s Breaking Barriers fest at Ravinia

“We created the Breaking Barriers Festival at Ravinia to shine a light on women in classical music,” Marin Alsop says in a video introduction to this second-annual weekend of concerts and celebration. In an evolution from last year’s focus, she adds, “This summer, we’re going to be featuring women composers. You’ll hear them composing for jazz and other genres, including singer-songwriters.” 

The roster for this mini-festival includes a number of high-profile Latina artists. Venezuelan composer and pianist Gabriela Montero kicks off the three-day festival July 21, playing her Latin Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Alsop’s baton. That same concert features Antrópolis, a piece composed by Gabriela Ortiz, while the July 22 headliner is singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade, making her Ravinia debut. Ortiz and Lafourcade, both from Mexico, have forged careers in part by blurring boundaries.

The scintillating mix of music styles represented in these concerts points to another kind of breaking barriers: honoring the connections between classical, folk, jazz and pop. In their own ways, Montero, Ortiz and Lafourcade each expresses her individual perspective about Latin American culture and identity through music.

“I fell in love with music once I understood that sounds have souls,” Ortiz says at the top of her official bio, “and it is through them that one may speak of oneself.”

Ortiz isn’t beholden to one style of music — or even one art form. Her compositions draw from the worlds of classical, jazz and folk (her parents were musicians in the famous folk ensemble Los Folkloristas). She writes music for dance, opera, theater and film, as well as commissions for orchestras worldwide. Her Antrópolis provides a fine example of the adage “write what you know” — or perhaps in this case, “write what you love.”

When composing it, she aimed to evoke very specific sonic memories: “the sound of the city through its dance halls and nightclubs.” In her commentary on the piece for its 2019 premiere, Ortiz said, “I wanted to pay a very personal tribute to some of those antros, or emblematic dance halls of Mexico City.”

Cultural heritage also informs the music of Lafourcade, who initially burst onto the pop scene while still a teenager. Today she’s a 39-year-old superstar, who, among many achievements, holds the record for the most Latin Grammys by a female artist: 15 and counting. U.S. audiences might know her best from singing a duet of Coco’s “Remember Me” at the 2018 Academy Awards.

Using music for healing is something many artists understand—and their listeners, too, if only intuitively. “I get a lot of comments from people who tell me that my music is very healing,” Montero said. “For me, music is more than the craft. In my case, it is a vehicle to communicate stories: stories of my country, stories of people. It’s a wider perspective.”

Those stories often come with heartbreak, because she hasn’t been back to Venezuela since 2010, when she recorded Solatino, which was “the first official and overtly political public statement I made against the Venezeulan regime,” she said. “One of the big prices I’ve had to pay for speaking out is not being able to go home.”

Since leaving Venezuela for the United States as a youth, Montero has resided in many countries, including Canada, Holland, England and Italy. She now lives in Maryland.

One year later, in 2011, she composed Ex Patria, which she describes as a “protest piece,” expressly about the Venezuelan government’s corruption, neglect, and violence against its own people. Written and recorded later that same decade, her Latin Concerto is not as overtly political, although she aimed to explore the tension between sunny surface depictions of South American countries and the complex realities. The concerto folds Latin rhythms and melodies throughout three movements, while also referencing Gershwin and Rachmaninov.

As Montero says: “Music is the language that goes straight to your heart.”

This is an excerpt of an article that appears in Ravinia magazine.