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Artist: Gabriela Montero
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Gabriela Montero:

Baroque

Bach and Beyond, Gabriela Montero's second album for EMI Classics, was a sensation: an instant Billboard bestseller that one critic called "a winner of an album."  Soon after the recording was released, Gabriela was profiled on CBS television's enormously popular television program 60 Minutes, introducing millions of viewers to a pianist possessing the most rare musical gifts.

Now, with the October 2007 release of her new album, Gabriela Montero – Baroque, the remarkable Venezuelan-American pianist turns her genius for improvisation to favorite melodies by the greatest baroque masters.

Improvisation is, of course, just one aspect of Gabriela Montero's art.  She is in demand with major orchestras and concert venues around the world, where she performs standard classical repertoire – including chamber music, concertos, and solo works – to great acclaim.  Following her New York Philharmonic debut, the New York Times reported simply, "Ms. Montero's playing had everything."  This season, Ms. Montero will make her New York solo classical debut at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 6, playing Schumann's Carnaval, Opus 9 and Ginastera's Sonata No. 1, Opus 22, along with her signature improvisations.

Ms. Montero takes some of the best known Baroque themes, including Pachelbel's Canon in D Major, Albinoni's Adagio, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Boccherini's Minuet and Handel's Water Music, and brings to her breathtaking improvisations the same passion, lyricism, and sense of structure that she brings to classical works.  And as the New York Times reported after one of her improvisational evenings, "No matter how complex the variations, the original melody always emerges triumphantly from a musical tapestry that might weave blues, jazz, tango, and Debussy into a multihued framework."

 

Gabriela Montero:

Piano Recital & Improvisations

Pianist Gabriela Montero offers a unique album of romantic piano works With a bonus CD of improvisations – Ms. Montero is a versatile talent that must be heard. 

This 2CD set - 1 disc classical repertoire and one 'bonus' improvisation - demonstrates Gabriela Montero's unique ability, not only as a classical musician, but as an improviser in jazz and classical styles.

A Romantic recital - This recital surveys various facets of musical Romanticism, encompassing the central pillars of 19th-century piano writing (Chopin and Liszt), Spanish-speaking musical nationalists (Falla, Granados and Ginastera), and Russian composer-pianists (Rachmaninov and Scriabin) who reinterpreted the profound influences of Chopin and Liszt in new harmonic and coloristic terms.

The three dances by Ginastera (1937) ring as much with Prokofiev's sarcasm as they do of feminine seduction. After the soft intimacies of Granados, the Gaucho Dance sounds like a machine gun. Downshift again to the wafer-thin arpeggios in Chopin's D-flat Nocturne. Montero plays it as a tender ballet realized en point. The Fantasie-Impromptu flows like water, first laughing then waxing nostalgic. The recital up to the Liszt has been glittering worlds in tiny spaces. If we wanted confirmation that Montero could be Teresa Carreno reborn, we have her Liszt C Minor Mephisto Waltz. The Devil's eyes shine like topaz as dancers swirl and filigree tumbles over three octaves. The middle section sings barcarolle-fashion, until the decorative, fanciful motifs, the open fifths and fiddler's trills, carry us back to the abyss. Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.

Gabriela Montero:

Rachmaninov - Montero

Gabriela Montero makes her Orchid Classics label debut with the world premiere of her first formal composition, Ex Patria, as well as her first concerto recording, Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2. She is joined by the YOA Orchestra of the Americas under Carlos Miguel Prieto. 

She says, "In recognition of the purest classical traditions, and in homage to the 19th century philosophy of Gesamtkunstwerk, I am attempting to focus on the totality of the artist's contribution to his or her art form, and to society as a whole. I am a pianist, a composer, and an improviser but, above all, I am a member of society."

Montero has long been a passionate advocate for the people of her native Venezuela and a vocal opponent of its Chavist government. It was in this that she found her inspiration as she sat down to write her opus 1. She says, "I had been waiting for the right story to tell. Feeling a profound sense of the loss of my native Venezuela to unprecedented levels of violence and corruption, I wrote Ex Patria. Dedicated to the 19,336 victims of homicide in my homeland in 2011, it is a polemical tone poem, an unapologetic vision of Venezuela's accelerating civic collapse and moral decay, manifested by a further 21,692 homicides in 2012 and 24,763 in 2013."

Montero adds, "Ex Patria is a portrayal of a country barely recognizable from that of my youth. It is my emotional response to the loss of Venezuela herself to lawlessness, corruption, and chaos." This album marks an important point in the evolution of Montero's career. Long acclaimed as a pianist and for her thrilling improvisations, with Ex Patria, Montero pays homage to the great tradition of composer/performers, in which Rachmaninov himself is indelibly etched. Like Rachmaninov, Montero is effectively an artist in exile, but the love of her homeland is never far from her creative mind. "Only a man who loves his country could compose this way", said Rachmaninov's friend Vladimir Wilshaw in a quote cited by journalist Jeremy Pound in the album booklet's essay, ‘Raising Voices: History and the Performing Composer'.