Lift off and experience the alma íberica with Gabriela Montero!
I’m probably not the only hodophile* who, upon hearing the word “Iberia”, automatically thinks: Spanish airline! No one forgets their first international flight, and mine was an Iberia flight from Johannesburg to Paris (via Barcelona) in an era when one still had to buy francs and pesetas, develop film rolls and call from pay phones. More important than the means of transportation it connotes, though, “Iberia” evokes a place – summoning the scent of citrus, sun-baked shrubland and olive groves, blue skies, azure seas, hilltop citadels and whitewashed villages.
Surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the north, west, and southwest, and the Mediterranean on the south and east, Iberia is the second-largest peninsula in Europe – exactly the size of 2.29 Oregons. The region includes all of Portugal, 92.5% of Spain, as well as Andorra, Gibraltar and a tiny sliver of France. And yes: While equating the area with olives and aperitifs, clicking castanets and swirling polka dots would be partially correct, it would also be an incomplete and inaccurate conjecture. Iberia is not a uniform, languid postcard destination. It’s a place of stark contrast, where poise and grit, the sacred and the profane, light and shadow are constantly in dramatic interplay.
What makes Gabriela Montero’s “Iberian”-themed program for her PPI recital on Sunday, October 25 so brilliant and so thrilling is the ease and ingenuity with which she traces historical, emotional and geographical paths without ever losing sight of the extreme dualities in the Iberian soul. From Soler to Scarlatti, from Granados to Albéniz, from Chopin to Mompou, to Liszt: Her program is as once earthy and ethereal, transporting her audience to a landscape so palpable and intoxicating that you’ll wonder whether your Lincoln Hall chair indeed became a seat in an Iberian Airlines cabin.
It’s no accident that, in presenting the alma íberica, Gabriela Montero is also presenting her own heart. Hailing from Caracas, Venezuela, she’s a modern-day mirror of that exact psychological inheritance. When the Spanish and Portuguese crossed the Atlantic, they didn't leave their contradictions behind – they transplanted them into the fertile, chaotic soil of the Americas. And whether Montero is relaying the introspective reminiscences of Alicia De Larrocha’s childhood in Barcelona, padre Antonio Soler’s yearnings from behind monastery walls, Chopin’s tormented reckonings with isolation and depression on a vacation-gone-awry or the extroverted, joyful flamenco rhythms of postcard Spain … the piano becomes the ultimate vehicle of active, unresolved tension.
You don’t have to board a plane to experience the intoxicating spectrum of Iberia. You can simply head to Lincoln Hall and let Gabriela Montero be your audio guide to a place that is equal parts cerebral awakening and visceral enjoyment.
* Your word of the day, meaning “lover of roads”, from the Greek “hodos” (ὁδός) meaning “way,” “road”, “path”, or “journey”, and philos (φίλος) / philia (φιλία), meaning “loving”, “dear” or “affection”.