March 2020 Track of the Month

Garden Songs
for Soprano and String Trio

by Pablo Ortiz

This Terezín Music Foundation commission was composed for soprano Dawn Upshaw for our collaboration with the Prague Spring International Festival. It is performed here by Lucy Fitz Gibbon and the Empyrean Ensemble. This selection, "Vespers, Parousia," is one of four songs in this piece; each is a setting of work by Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück.

PABLO ORTIZ is a professor of composition at the University of California, Davis. Prizes and commissions include those from the Fromm Music Foundation in 1992, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, and the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. In 1997 and 1998, Ortiz was commissioned to write two chamber operas, Parodia and Una voz en el viento, by the Centro Experimental Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. In 1999 he was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation to write a piece, Raya en el mar, for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

He received a grant in 2000 from Fideicomiso para la cultura Mexico-US to write children’s songs. In 2004 the Gerbode Foundation commissioned Oscuro, for Chanticleer and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. In 2008 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent premieres include Suomalainen tango, for orchestra, by the Orquestra Nacional de Catalunya, Trois tangos en marge by the Kovacik, Dann, Karttunen trio at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Notker, for choir and organ, by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices in Copenhagen. He has worked with artist Eduardo Stupia on a multimedia oratorio for female voices, harp, and percussion, which premiered at the Centro Experimental Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, in August 2012.
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