Image credit: Antoine Saito Discover new vocal works paying tribute to Canada’s Indigenous peoples, alongside works from composers Gabriela Ortiz and Richard Strauss. The second concert of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) opens with two new vocal works paying tribute to Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Indigenous Canadian sopranos Emma Pennell and Elisabeth St-Gelais join the orchestra for two powerful OSM commissions that pay tribute to Canada’s Indigenous communities. Next up is Gabriela Ortiz’s cello concerto Dzonot, an evocation of the subterranean rivers, caves and stunning wildlife of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Ortiz has described the piece as a ‘form of protest’, responding to our neglect of these valuable ecosystems. Ortiz, also featured in the LA Phil’s programme, wrote the piece for cello soloist Alisa Weilerstein, who plays with ‘directness and insight… technical prowess and depth of feeling’ (The Guardian). She portrays, among other things, a jaguar and the iridescent Toh bird, part of the ecosystem that Ortiz’s work calls on us to preserve. Finally, we move to Germany in the 1890s and Richard Strauss’s sumptuous tone poem Ein Heldenleben. With a stirring battle episode, ardent love music and playful quotations from the composer’s earlier works, it is a musical self-portrait both mischievous and deeply moving.

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