Gabriela Ortiz: three European residencies in coming season
Growing interest in Gabriela Ortiz’s music throughout Europe is reflected in three major residencies across the 2025/26 season, with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Palau de la Música in Barcelona.
Recent years have seen a marked growth in performances for Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, not only in the Americas but also in Europe with major orchestras and venues programming her music and commissioning new works. Over the coming season she will be travelling to London, Amsterdam and Barcelona for residencies with the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Concertgebouw and the Palau de la Música.
As Featured Composer with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Gabriela Ortiz’s music is programmed in 18 concerts presented internationally over the coming season. An upbeat to this residency takes place at the BBC Proms on 20 August, when Ortiz’s orchestral work Antrópolis is performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London with the Philharmonia’s Principal Conductor Santtu-Matthias Rouvali on the podium.
The Philharmonia travels to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 24 September for a programme launched with Ortiz’s new 12-minute commission Si el oxígeno fuera verde, conducted by Rouvali. This is followed by further performances at the Royal Festival Hall in London (25 September), the Corn Exchange in Bedford (13 October) and the Musikverein in Vienna (14 October). The orchestra and Rouvali then cross the Atlantic to give the work’s first North American performances on a US tour in October, visiting the Mondavi Center (CA), Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley (CA), Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa (CA), Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor (MI), Strathmore Music Center (MD), and finally Carnegie Hall in New York on 29 October.
Si el oxígeno fuera verde, translated as If Oxygen Were Green, is dedicated to the memory of Gabriela Ortiz’s friend and fellow Mexican musician Jorge Verdin, founder of the Nortec Collective, who was known by his artist name ‘Clorofila’, establishing the ‘green’ connection with her score. As the composer notes: “The title’s metaphor suggests the fragile green murmur of life – where a disruptive, ecological nature can be imagined as a forest that, after a transformative event, reinvents itself and blooms with greater diversity and sustainability.” Across the work’s four short sections, Ortiz reflects the self-replicating structures of nature in musical terms, with each section offering “an autonomous life cycle within an infinite universe”.
Other highlights of Ortiz’s Philharmonia residency include her concerto Altar de Bronce, with two leading Venezuelan musicians, trumpeter Pacho Flores and conductor Rafael Payare, at the centre of a programme presented at De Montfort Hall in Leicester (26 November) and the Royal Festival Hall in London (27 November). Her cello concerto Dzonot, inspired by the extraordinary landscape of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, receives its first UK performances with soloist Alisa Weilerstein, who can be heard on the work’s recent premiere recording on the Platoon label (PLAT27432). Marin Alsop conducts the three performances of Dzonot at The Marlowe in Canterbury (11 March), the Royal Festival Hall in London (12 March) and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester (13 March).
Gabriela Ortiz has curated an ensemble concert in the Philharmonia’s Music of Today series, which precedes the London performance of Dzonot (12 March). The programme aims to offer a wider view on the fresh, diverse music of Latin America. Alongside her own Corpórea, which explores the duality between the physical and the intangible, she has chosen Herbert Vázquez’s Son Crepuscular, for clarinet and string quartet, and Francisco Cortés-Álvarez’s Transcending Walls, inspired by the work of muralists on the Mexican side of the Mexico-US border.
The Philharmonia residency is completed with Ortiz’s orchestral work Tzam, in a Royal Festival Hall programme conducted by Ruth Reinhardt (29 March). The title is the word for ‘dialogue’ in Ayapaneco, one of the more than 60 indigenous languages found in Mexico today but close to extinction. Prologue and epilogue see two stereophonically arranged brass groups communicating across the platform, while the central body of the work seeks the dialogue with the living and the dead that is so fundamental to the human condition.
> Visit the Philharmonia website
The world premiere of Si el oxígeno fuera verde in Amsterdam on 24 September is also the launch of Gabriela Ortiz’s residency at the Concertgebouw. Chamber events at the prestige concert hall throughout the 2025/26 season include the Dutch premiere of Ortiz’s new string quartet Mujer Ángel performed by the Alinde Quatett (29 October). The guitar ensemble SoloDuo performs De ida y vuelta (22 November) and the Dudok Quartet plays Aroma Foliado and is joined by soprano Axelle Fanyo for Baalkah, inspired by the cosmological beliefs of the Maya civilisation. Ortiz’s role at the Concertgebouw is a residency in the true sense, as she will be living and working in Amsterdam for a month, composing a new orchestral work commissioned by the Concertgebouw for premiere in the 2026/27 season.
> Visit the Concertgebouw website
Gabriela Ortiz’s third European residency is at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona with her music featured in seven concerts spread over the 2025/2026 season. The series is launched with the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès performing Antropolis (20 September), followed by Frames Percussion and the GIO Symphonia joining for her concerto for percussion ensemble and orchestra Altar de Neón (9 October). The Attacca Quartet, who premiered Mujer Ángel in Madrid in March, give the first Barcelona performance (23 January), before bringing the work to Kings Place in London (24 January).
Ortiz has been commissioned by the Palau de la Música to write a new choral score to be premiered by the Cor de Cambra del Palau (21 March). The a cappella work will set texts by the Mexican novelist and essayist Jorge Volpi interspersed with recitations of the scientific names of various extinct bird species. A further reference for the new score is Miro’s painting Mujer, Pájaro, Estrella (Woman, Bird and Star), one of a series of paintings exploring similar themes.
The Palau de la Música residency culminates in an orchestral programme by the Orquestra Simfònica del Vallès featuring Kauyumari and the trumpet concerto Altar de Bronce, with soloist Pacho Flores and conductor Andrés Salado (11 April). The final event sees violinist Maria Dueñas performing De Cuerda y Madera (17 April): this recital follows her Spanish premiere of Ortiz’s violin concerto Altar de Cuerda in Barcelona earlier this year and the triple Grammy Award-winning recording on the Platoon label (PLAT23452).
> Visit the Palau de la Música website
Beyond the Barcelona residency there is a wealth of Ortiz performances in Spain over the coming season. Johannes Moser is cello soloist for the first European performances of Dzonot with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Castilla-leon (19/23 September), Kauyumari is played by the Real Orquesta Sinfonica de Sevilla and Orquesta Filarmonica de Malaga, Clara by the Orquesta Real Filharmonia de Galicia, and Téenek by the Bilbao Orkestra Sinfonikoa.
> Further information on Work: Si el oxígeno fuera verde
Photo: Mara Arteaga