Gabriela Ortiz: Revolución diamantina in Berlin, London and Edinburgh
This summer brings first European performances of Gabriela Ortiz’s triple GRAMMY Award-winning Revolución diamantina conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. This powerful symphonic tribute to the feminist Glitter Revolution in her native Mexico City can be heard at the Berlin Philharmonie, the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival.
Following its premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel in 2023, Gabriela Ortiz’s Revolución diamantina has been winning plaudits for the Mexican-born composer with a series of awards and international performances. This summer sees the work travelling to Europe for the first time with high profile concert appearances in Berlin, London and Edinburgh. On 18-20 June Gustavo Dudamel conducts three performances with the Berlin Philharmonic and voices from the Berlin Radio Choir, and the conductor returns at the helm of the LA Philharmonic and LA Master Chorale on tour to the BBC Proms on 12 August and the Edinburgh International Festival on 14 August.
Scored for eight women’s voices and symphony orchestra, the 42-minute score was commissioned as a ballet, performed first in concert by the LA Philharmonic at the inaugural California Festival in 2023, followed by danced performances in LA earlier this year with the Brazilian troupe Grupo Corpo and choreography by Rodrigo Pederneiras and Cassi Abranches. Revolución diamantina has also been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Giancarlo Guerrero and returns to its roots with a Mexican premiere on 4 July by the Orquesta Urtext conducted by Lina González-Granados at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The Czech premiere follows this autumn at the Filharmonie Hradec Králové’s Hudební Forum Festival on 22 October.
In February 2025 Revolución diamantina won Ortiz three GRAMMY Awards including for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. The Platoon recording featuring the LA Philharmonic under Dudamel also won GRAMMY Awards for Best Classical Compendium and Best Orchestral Performance. The composer’s triple success was matched this year with three further GRAMMY Awards for the cello concerto Dzonot as heard on Platoon’s second Ortiz release Yanga, again featuring the LA Philharmonic and Dudamel.
In Revolución diamantina Ortiz decided to highlight a deeply complex and painful subject: the different forms of violence against women that in many cases end in femicide. She drew on protests in Mexico City, launched in 2019 by the Glitter Revolution when women took to the streets, throwing pink glitter at the chief of police, denouncing the lack of response following the rape of a woman by local officers. Three years later female police officers joined feminist protesters marching on International Women’s Day, with the united cry for justice and respect for women’s rights: ‘Mujer escucha, esta es tu lucha’, or ‘Listen up, women, this is your struggle’. To fashion the ballet’s scenario, Ortiz collaborated with author Cristina Rivera Garza who created a “poetic dramaturgy that touches on the essential fibres of feminism”.
The composer describes how “the ballet is divided into six acts that traverse various scenarios related to feminism: harassment and a lack of security in public spaces, the confusion between the language of romantic love and practices of manipulation and control that all too often, can lead to lethal forms of violence against women; solitude and a lack of sense of belonging; the voices of the disappeared; a blind march that makes its appearance on the horizon of a nonsensical place; the intimate terrorism that goes on between couples, as well as its stages and consequences; street protests and their cries for justice; and finally, the aspiration that only by walking together will we be able to find a way out, because even though we may have only indirectly experienced much of what has been described here, their cause is also our own: that of all of us, women and men and people.”
Recent works by Gabriela Ortiz include Si el oxígeno fuera verde (If Oxygen Were Green), an orchestral meditation on environmental themes, toured extensively last autumn by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Santtu-Matias Rouvali. As well as her role as Featured Composer with the Philharmonia, this season has seen Ortiz residencies with the Palau de la Música in Barcelona and with the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Her new orchestral work La Reina Roja (The Red Queen) receives first European performances next season including in Linz, Amsterdam and Paris conducted by Alondra de la Parra.
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Photo: Mara Arteaga