Gabriela Ortiz’s music has been performed by prominent orchestras and soloists all over the world. The Mexican composer, who has listed Beethoven, Bartók, Stravinsky as well as mariachi bands among her early influences, writes avant-garde music with a Latin feel. Her extensive catalog contains everything from opera to electroacoustic music, as well as a large number of orchestral, chamber and solo works.
Ortiz is deeply attached to the musical traditions of her country (her parents were co-founders of the prominent Mexican folk group Los Folkloristas). She is particularly devoted to the history of Native Mexicans.
The composer has offered the following comments on the present work, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and premiered under Gustavo Dudamel’s direction on October 9, 2021:

Among the Huichol people of Mexico, Kauyumari means “blue deer.” The blue deer
represents a spiritual guide, one that is transformed through an extended pilgrimage into a hallucinogenic cactus called peyote. It allows the Huichol to communicate with their ancestors, do their bidding, and take on their role as guardians of the planet. Each year, these Native Mexicans embark on a symbolic journey to “hunt” the blue deer, making offerings in gratitude for having been granted access to the invisible world, through which they also are able to heal the wounds of the soul.

When I received the commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to compose a piece that would reflect on our return to the stage following the pandemic, I immediately thought of the blue deer and its power to enter the world of the intangible as akin to a celebration of the reopening of live music. Specifically, I thought of a Huichol melody sung by the De La Cruz family—dedicated to recording ancestral folklore that I used for the final movement of my piece, Altar de Muertos (Altar of the Dead), commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet in 1997. I used this material within the orchestral context and elaborated on the construction and progressive development of the melody and its accompaniment in such a way that it would symbolize the blue deer. This in turn was transformed into an orchestral texture which gradually evolves into a complex rhythm pattern, to such a degree that the melody itself becomes unrecognizable (the imaginary effect of peyote and our awareness of the invisible realm), giving rise to a choral wind section while maintaining an incisive rhythmic accompaniment as a form of reassurance that the world will naturally follow its course.

While composing this piece, I noted once again how music has the power to grant us access to the intangible; healing our wounds and binding us to what can only be expressed through sound. Although life is filled with interruptions, Kauyumari is a comprehension and celebration of the fact that each of these rifts is also a new beginning.

Johannes Brahms was twenty years old when he first met the great Hungarian-born violinist Joseph Joachim, two years his senior, for whom he would write his Violin Concerto more than twenty years later. Their bond was strengthened by the fact that both had been protégés of Robert Schumann. Joachim started his career as a child prodigy, making his debut at age 12 under Felix Mendelssohn. He was also one of the first champions of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, until then a neglected work.
Joachim had been asking Brahms for a violin concerto for a long time. Finally, in the summer of 1878, the composer set to work during his summer vacation at Pörtschach on Lake Wörth in the Austrian province of Carinthia. The previous summer, Brahms had composed his Second Symphony in the same place, and the two works have a number of features in common: they share not only their tonality (D major) and the meter of their first movements (3/4), but their mostly serene mood as well. Brahms and Joachim worked closely on many details of violin technique; Brahms frequently asked the violinist for advice, although he didn’t always follow it…
The gigantic first movement (itself more than 20 minutes in length) presents an entire gamut of characters, from majestic to lyrical and from calm to agitated. Like the classical concertos, it allows room for a cadenza to be added by the soloist. The cadenza written by Joachim (who was a composer in his own right) continues to be used in performances to this day.
The second movement starts with a rapturous oboe solo, accompanied by a group of wind instruments. Its melody closely resembles one of Brahms’s most beautiful songs, the “Sapphic Ode.” The solo violin embellishes the melody with lavish figurations, and takes it through several stages of transformations, involving many subtle changes of key, before we reach the ethereal ending.
Both the first and the last movements are begun by the orchestra. The finale, by contrast, starts with a violin solo, giving the soloist no time to rest: the last chord of the Adagio is immediately followed by the lively theme of the last movement. The style of this rondo was inspired by Hungarian Gypsy tunes, which had inspired Brahms in his Hungarian dances and his G-minor piano quartet as well. The impetuous theme is contrasted with some calmer episodes. Its final return, in a faster tempo, gives the concerto its exuberant conclusion.

The sea is definitely one of the protagonists in Britten’s great opera Peter Grimes. A source of the livelihood for the fishermen of the Suffolk coast of East Anglia, it can also inspire fear, and bring death and destruction.
Benjamin Britten was born on the Suffolk coast, not far from Aldeburgh, home of the 18th-century poet George Crabbe, on whose work Peter Grimes was based. Later, Britten bought a house in the town (at 4 Crabbe Street) and lived in Aldeburgh until his death. In 1948, Britten, together with his life partner, the great tenor Peter Pears (who had created the role of Peter Grimes) and librettist/producer Eric Crozier, founded a music festival there; the Aldeburgh Festival became one of the most important musical venues in the world.
For all his strong ties to East Anglia, it is ironic that Britten first came across Crabbe’s tale while living in the United States during the years of World War II. The nostalgic feelings the tale evoked were a strong factor in Britten’s decision to return to England in 1942.
When Britten started planning his opera about Peter Grimes, he and his librettist Montagu Slater made important changes in the character. In Crabbe’s poem, Grimes was a villain, a drunkard and a brute who had caused the death of three of his young apprentices. In the opera, he became a much more complex person: an outcast, guilty of violence but not of murder, trying hard to rid himself of his bad reputation but brought down by his great pride, his emotional instability and a hostile and deeply prejudiced environment.
There are six orchestral interludes in the opera, introducing or separating the various scenes. Britten published four of these as Four Sea Interludes (Op. 33a). A fifth interlude, ‟Passacaglia,” was published separately as Op. 33b. The sixth interlude, introducing Grimes’s ‟mad scene” in Act III, cannot be easily extracted from its context in the opera.
The Four Sea Interludes capture much of the opera’s special ambiance. They suggest the austere atmosphere that provides the background to the plot, and the music has special links with some of the main characters, such as Peter or the widowed schoolteacher Ellen Orford who is Peter’s only friend in the community. The sequence of the interludes in the suite is different than in the opera, because Britten realized that the ‟Storm” from Act I had to come at the end in a concert performance.
The first interlude, ‟Dawn,” separates the opera’s prologue from Act I, Scene 1. The prologue contains a court scene where the death of Grimes’s first apprentice is being investigated, as well as a short dialog between Peter and Ellen confirming their friendship. The music of the interlude is rather static; it consists of an eerie melodic line of long notes played by violins and flutes in their high register, interrupted by unsettling arpeggios in the harp and sixteenth-note runs in the clarinets and violas. It sets the stage for an opening scene where weary townspeople go about their daily work in a somewhat lethargic way. (This music also returns at the end of the opera, where the townspeople again attend to their usual business while Peter’s boat is going down.)
The second interlude, ‟Sunday Morning,” opens Act II of the opera. A jaunty rhythmic motif signals the joyful, festive atmosphere. A second, expressive melody, announced by violas and cellos, alludes to Ellen whose stage entrance it prepares. Soon we hear church bells ringing: the townspeople are all at the service, except for Ellen and John, Peter’s new apprentice. The concert version of the interlude includes the first half of Scene 1, without the vocal parts. The church bells and the contentment of the townspeople serve as the background for some very perturbing developments: in the course of this scene Ellen discovers that Peter has been treating his new apprentice just as cruelly as he had the previous boy.
The third interlude, ‟Moonlight,” serves as the opening of Act III. At the end of Act II, the young apprentice fell to his death (although at this point it is not known whether or not he is actually dead). At first, the music is again of a static, motionless character, but then the somber string chords gradually begin to intensify. They are punctuated by short interjections from flutes, trumpets, xylophone and harp. The interlude is followed by a dance scene in the pub, but what its tragic tone really anticipates is the later scene where Peter goes to sea for the last time to sink his own boat.
The fourth interlude, ‟Storm,” occurs between the two scenes of Act I. It depicts high winds on the sea but is at the same time a psychological portrait of Peter, torn between his desire for peace and a propensity for violence he can’t resist. This movement is dominated for the most part by an energetic fortissimo motif; it later calms down and we hear a lyrical melody on strings, played pianissimo. This is the theme Peter sang in the previous scene to the words:

What harbour shelters peace
away from tidal waves,
away from storms,
What harbour can embrace
terrors and tragedies?

Peter can never find the comfort he seeks. The opera has a tragic ending, foreshadowed in this interlude by the return of the storm music and its relentless progress towards an abrupt conclusion.

The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34 (1946)
(Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell)
by Britten

The potential of the theme-and-variation form is seemingly endless. One of the simplest structural designs in Western music, it has been adapted to the most diverse purposes, from Renaissance and Baroque dance sets to what amounts to veritable encyclopedias of musical thought in the great variation works of Bach and Beethoven. A set of variations can stand at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a multi-movement work, or it can be self-contained and incorporate all the contrasts in tempo and dynamics to which, under different circumstances, whole symphonies could be devoted.
Britten’s Purcell Variations is such a miniature symphony, where ‟micro-movements” of many different characters—slow movements, scherzo, march, waltz, etc.—grow out of the initial idea taken from Purcell.
In 1946, Britten was asked to write music for an educational film called The Instruments of the Orchestra. He chose to base his piece on a hornpipe dance by Henry Purcell (1659-1695), from the incidental music to Abdelazer or The Moor’s Revenge, a play by 17th-century playwright Mrs. Aphra Behn. Britten conceived the variations on this melody in such a way that each would highlight a different instrument or instrumental group in the orchestra. Even the theme is divided into six sections featuring, in turn, the full orchestra, the woodwinds, the brass, the string, the percussion, and the full orchestra again.
In the variations themselves, which are 13 in number, Britten matched instrumental color with musical character, producing short vignettes that run the gamut from playful to serious. The woodwinds are introduced in the order in which they are written in the score: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon. Then we hear the violins in a Brillante—alla polacca variation, the violas and the cellos in two wistful slow melodies, and the basses in a humorous variation that sometimes sounds like a waltz and sometimes doesn’t. Britten didn’t forget (and didn’t want his ‟young person” to forget, either) that the family of stringed instruments included the harp, which is treated to a goodly number of arpeggios and cascades of chords following the double-bass variation.
The brass instruments are next: the festive signals of the horns and the lively game of the two trumpets are followed by an Allegro pomposo for three trombones and tuba. Finally, an ingenious variation featuring the timpani and percussion reduces Purcell’s melody to a rhythmic skeleton, with the strings providing a rudimentary harmonic accompaniment.
The piece is crowned by a brilliant fugue begun by the piccolo; the other instruments enter one by one in the same order in which they have been introduced during the course of the variations. At the end of the piece, the fugue theme is combined with the original form of the Purcell melody (here in the major mode), played by the brass as the other instruments carry on their florid contrapuntal parts. The work concludes with an exuberance that, in the words of writer and composer Imogen Holst, ‟is surely one of the ingredients that makes Britten’s music acceptable to so many inexperienced listeners, whatever their ages may be.”