Carmen Téllez and IU's CVE Premiere
Orrego-Salas's La ciudad celeste
On December 5th 2004 (8:00 pm, School of Music Auer Hall) professor and Latin American Music Center director Carmen Téllez will lead the IU School of Music's Contemporary Vocal Ensemble in the premiere of La ciudad celeste (The Celestial City) by Chilean composer and IU School of Music Professor Emeritus Juan Orrego-Salas, who was the founder of the Latin American Music Center. This concert is part of a series of events of the colloquium "Composer and Community" organized by the LAMC to honor and celebrate the 85th birthday of Orrego-Salas. A pre-concert lecture will take place at 6:45 pm.
In 1992 the Frei Foundation in Chile commissioned Juan Orrego-Salas to compose a cantata to commemorate the fifth centennial of the evangelization in Latin America. The composer decided to use Chapter XXI of the Book of Revelations, a text that he had long been considering for a work of this kind.
La ciudad celeste is a single movement work. Its "continuum" is based on a dialogue between the baritone soloist and the chorus, with several orchestral episodes reflecting the outstanding images of the biblical narration.
The composer has expressed that he was mainly attracted by the surrealistic quality of John the Divine's description of a city descending from the celestial space like "a bride adorned for her husband."
In this cantata Orrego-Salas appears immersed in a style of his own, in spite of his having been attracted in his development as a composer to many of the techniques and aesthetics of his time, including serialism. As he has been described by a music critic, Orrego-Salas continues "beating his own drum." Some of these characteristics include neo-classical language, colorful instrumentation, changing textures, and a close relationship between text and music.
One of the most important figures in the history of contemporary Latin American music, Juan Orrego-Salas has contributed as a musician to diverse areas of music, especially composition, musicology, and theory. In addition he has performed crucial scholarly and administrative duties, including the founding and direction of the Latin American Music Center.
La ciudad celeste was dedicated to Orrego-Salas's friend and former student Juan Pablo Izquierdo. Izquierdo is currently the conductor of the Carnegie-Melon Orchestra in Pittsburgh.
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