Ravinia 2023 Issue 3

“ ALL I WANTED TO DO IN MY CRIB WAS PLAY THIS LITTLE PIANO. ” Natalia Lafourcade ANDERS BROGAARD (MONTERO); SONIA SIEFF (LAFOURCADE) on that fast train, and I’ve been on that track ever since.” FAST FORWARD to the present day, and it’s easy to understand why Mon- tero carves time out from her career to mentor a new generation. Having so vividly experienced the importance of having teachers with vision and generosity, Montero pays it forward: She recently collaborated with the global music conservatory OAcademy to create the Gabriela Montero Piano Lab, a mentorship program. She meets with her students both virtually and also in person, in Europe and in the States, with flexibility due to her busy performing and composing sched- ule. “I learn a tremendous amount as well,” she notes with enthusiasm. “Mentoring and teaching have made my playing develop—it’s an active process on both parts.” Regarding Montero’s performance at Ravinia, she’ll play her Piano Concerto No. 1, familiarly known as the “Latin Concerto.” She composed it in 2016 and recorded it in Chile a couple years later. “It’s a chiaroscuro reflection on who we are as a conti- nent, dark and light,” she says. “It has all the rhythms, the charm and the sensuality that people love about Latin America—but unfortunately, those characteristics keep the world from actually noticing what’s really going on. So it’s not a political piece, but it’s a statement: Not everything that glitters is gold.” Perhaps at the conclusion of that piece, Montero will open herself up to suggestions from the audience for some keyboard improvisation. “I don’t need the public to give me a theme, but I like to involve them,” she says. “If they give me the theme, then they recognize it within the improvisation, and it also proves that I’m doing it on the spot. Let’s say they give me a pop- ular song, then it becomes a fugue, then a chorale, then a tango. I don’t plan it; it just happens by itself. It’s fun to see the reactions. It’s a process that’s beautiful when it’s shared.” Her audience can’t see her visual cortex lighting up when her “second brain” ignites, but they hear the thrill- ing results as the notes flow from her fingers. As she says with a chuckle, referring to her amazing brain: “It’s a nice glitch to have.” Native Chicagoan Web Behrens has spent most of his journalism career covering arts and culture. His work has appeared in the pages of the Chicago Tribune , Time Out Chicago , Crain’s Chicago Business , and The Advocate and Chicago magazines. release is yet another boundary-breaker for Lafourcade, who as- sembled an interna- tional band to record it. Many of the songs concern various forms of grief: a difficult romantic breakup, and the death of her nephew, who suf- fered a fatal fall while hiking in Chile. “The thing with this album is: The influences and the references were totally in another place,” Lafourcade told PopMatters late last year. “It was a lot of jazz, a lot of meditation music. It was classical music. It was Brazilian music. It was so hard for me to come back to my inner garden, my own sound, so I was trying to do it in a different way than before. That was really hard, and very playful. It felt really good to dig in—to go very, very, very deep—to find that sound.” 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 says. “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 says. “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 spoke to Ravinia from her home in Maryland.) One year later, in 2011, she composed Ex Patria , which she describes as a “protest piece,” expressly about the government’s corruption, neglect, and vio- lence 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 (includ- ing a very recognizable mambo) throughout three movements, while also referencing Gershwin and Rachmaninoff. As Montero says: “Music is the language that goes straight to your heart.” RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 17 – JULY 30, 2023 10