By Web Behrens
Ravinia is accustomed to certain headlines preceding the world-class musicians on its stages. The sorts of international acclaim and attention given to the performers appearing to eager crowds in Highland Park, while unwaveringly deserved, is seldom rare. Topping Billboard charts, winning Grammy Awards—all superb accomplishments, but ones shared by many on the schedule.
A wildly talented phenomenon whose musical gifts became apparent before the age of 2; a polyglot who’s lived on three different continents, now widely recognized as an innovative composer and performer—these, too, are biographical elements and achievements you could find among a couple artists coming to Ravinia this summer. All together, a sketch of pianist Gabriela Montero strongly takes shape.
But there’s a very singular story only Montero can share: Among all the articles written about her—many full of praise from classical music writers around the globe—is a fascinating study written in 2019 and published the following year in NeuroImage. Headlined “Classical creativity: A functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of pianist and improviser Gabriela Montero,” the article documents what neurologist Charles Limb found when he peered into her brain. He and his team had previously studied jazz musicians, but Montero provided them a unique opportunity to study someone steeped in classical composition and performance.
With such bona fides of ability and adventurousness, Montero’s simpatico with Ravinia’s Breaking Barriers Festival is little surprise. She kicks off the series of events this year focused on women composers—anchored by three evening concerts—with a performance of her Latin Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Friday, July 21.
What intrigued researchers about the inner workings of Montero’s little grey cells is what makes her especially notable among her cohort of top classical musicians: The Venezuelan-born pianist has a knack for extraordinary improvisation. She’s known for adding an off-the-cuff coda to the end of her live performances. Some of her discography features extemporaneous playing, too, including 2006’s Bach and Beyond, 2008’s Baroque Improvisations, and a 2015 release that comprises her own composition, Ex Patria, along with Rachmaninoff and three improv tracks.
Although a rarity in the classical world of the 20th and 21st centuries, Montero’s spontaneous creations put her in amazing company: Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert were all masters of improvisation. Given her remarkable status among modern-day musicians, she was a natural subject for Dr. Limb, who had previously spent years studying the brains of jazz and hip-hop artists, both of whom are renowned for freestyling. As the published study notes, “Gabriela Montero is unique because she is a world-class classical pianist who not only perfects her performance of standard Western art repertoire but is also equally active in generative musical activities like improvisation.”
In preparation for the actual testing session at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Montero practiced playing a custom-made MIDI keyboard while laying supine in a mock scanner. After she became comfortable with that, “I ended up in an MRI machine for about two hours while they examined my brain during three different tasks,” she tells Ravinia Magazine. “They wanted to see how my brain behaves when I play a memorized piece, then a scale, then an improvisation. I never knew which order would be given. They wanted to see what happens when my brains switches randomly from one [musical approach] to another.
“What they found was really amazing,” she continues. “When I improvise, what I call ‘getting out of the way’ means that a different part of my brain is activated—one which doesn’t really have anything to do with music. My visual cortex goes crazy, and that’s what I improvise with.
“It’s beautiful, because it kind of explains something: When I was a little girl, I would say to my father, ‘I have two brains.’ I’d play the repertoire, and then I’d go into this kind of trance where I improvise, and it’s very complex and I couldn’t explain it. It’s as though I do have two brains.”
After improvising an encore to her 2012 appearance at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, performing Grieg’s Piano Concerto, Gabriela Montero accepts an enthusiastic ovation from the front row.
Montero’s musical biography begins even before her memories do. Born in Caracas in 1970, she received a toy piano for Christmas when she was seven months old. Her parents soon noticed something. “All I wanted to do, in my crib, was play this little piano,” she says. “By the time I was a year-and-a-half, I had this repertoire of children’s songs, lullabies, the national anthem of Venezuela. Everything that I heard, everything that my mother would sing to me, I’d go to this piano and reproduce it.”
Her parents quickly recognized they were raising a prodigy, even though nobody in their family had musical skill. “It was quite a curve ball for them. They really didn’t know what they were doing,” Montero explains. “They weren’t at all connected to classical music. But like all loving parents, they tried to make the best decisions possible to guide my talents.”
After 8-year-old Gabriela made her concert debut in Caracas, the Family Montero left Venezuela for the United States, pursuing private education. Still, her path forward was not always smooth. She ended up with a teacher in Miami “who was not the right person for me. It was just closed-mindedness, really, and not understanding the value of spontaneous composition.”
That led to an existential struggle that caused her to question her relationship with music. “I actually stopped playing for a few years. I turned my back on it completely,” she continues. “And then, out of desperation, I sent a tape to the Royal Academy of Music in London. I got a full scholarship; they opened up their arms to me. I ended up there, studying with Hamish Milne, an incredible professor, musician, and human being. So I really consider my music education to begin then, when I was 20.”
Montero entered another period of uncertainty some years later, after winning the bronze medal at the International Chopin Piano Competition at age 25. “After that, I started to play less and less. Again, the questions: ‘Why am I doing this? Is this what I want to do? Where am I going with this?’ I always have a lot of questions.” Two years later, she had her first of two children, which naturally led to even more wondering.
Again, Montero emerged from that confusion through a combination of her own moxie and the grace of finding the right mentor to encourage her. By age 31, she had stopped playing and was considering a career in psychology. But music still called to her, and she made a fateful decision one night in Montreal: She attended a performance by noted Argentine pianist Martha Argerich, whom she describes as “a total original, and a very warm and very generous human being. She’s an icon who’s helped a lot of the younger generation.”
Montero had met her before, many years ago, as a teen. Nevertheless, “I went to see her backstage. She absolutely knew who I was,” she continues. “I asked her to have a coffee together. I was a new mom, and I wanted to discuss being a woman, being a mother, being an artist—how to reconcile those roles. She shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Well, I don’t really have much advice, but I’d love hear you.’ I didn’t want to play for her, but I thought, ‘Well, how can I say no to Martha?’ ”
After some resistance, Montero tickled the ivories for Argerich the next night. “That really shook me out of my sleepiness. After a time when I wasn’t really playing, it just changed everything. That’s really the second part of my life: From there on, I got 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 Montero 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 schedule. “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 continent, 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 popular 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 thrilling 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.
BREAKING BARRIERS with Lafourcade, Ortiz and Montero
Marin Alsop
“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 CSO under Alsop’s baton. That same concert includes Antrópolis, a piece composed by Gabriela Ortiz, while the July 22 headliner is singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade, making her Ravinia debut. Both remarkable Mexican musicians, Ortiz and Lafourcade have forged thrilling 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 express their individual perspectives about Latin American culture and identity through music.
Gabriela Ortiz
“I fell in love with music once I understood that sounds have souls,” Ortiz notes 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 old 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 reveals, “I wanted to pay a very personal tribute to some of those antros, or emblematic dance halls of Mexico City.”
Cultural heritage also pervades 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. US. audiences might know her best from singing a duet of Coco’s “Remember Me” at the 2018 Academy Awards, although she also scored crossover success in 2015 with Hasta la Raíz—the utterly enthralling title track (“To the Root”) showcases both her songwriting and her voice to perfection.
The course of her career has been anything but predictable. Instead of sticking to pop-rock grooves, she tapped into the rebellious spirit of rock and roll and began innovating. Her releases include an instrumental record and multiple albums steeped in Mexican folk music—including the alluring Musas, a pair of acoustic albums covering classic Latin songs, accompanied by Los Macorinos, a septuagenarian guitar duo.
Natalia Lafourcade
Now Lafourcade is touring in the wake of releasing De Todas las Flores, her first album of all-original material since Hasta la Raíz. The new release is yet another boundary-breaker for Lafourcade, who assembled an international band to record it. Many of the songs concern various forms of grief: a difficult romantic breakup, and the death of her nephew, who suffered 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 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 (including 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.” ■