Gabriela Ortiz Featured at LA International New Music Festival

by Ted Gordon on June 18, 2015, 10:20 a.m.

Gabriela Ortiz, one of Mexico's most vibrant contemporary composers, will see her music featured in this year's LA International New Music Festival, presented by Southwest Chamber Music. An entire evening will be dedicated to string quartets by Ortiz, including Altar de Muertos, shown above, which was commissoned and premiered by the Kronos Quartet in 1997. On July 8th, this evocative quartet will be performed by the Eclipse Quartet, alongside two other works by Ortiz, in REDCAT, located inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall. 

In addition to Altar de Muertos, which explores the Día de los Muertos, the Mexican day of the dead, the Eclipse Quartet will perform Aroma Foliado, influenced by the American artist Suzanne Bocanegra. To explore issues of heritage, influence, and formal regeneration, this quartet builds on short passages from Mozart's String Quartet No. 21 in D Major (K. 575). Rounding out the program will be Baalkah— meaning "world" or "cosmos" in several Mayan languages— another deeply evocative and theatrical string quartet. 

On July 9th, the festival continues its exploration of composers from around the world with a performance of Toshio Hosokawa's The Raven, a monodrama for mezzo-soprano and 12 players, based on Edgar Allan Poe's story of the same name.