Two of Canada’s better-travelled orchestras have headed to Mexico this month for the 37th annual Festival international Cervantino de Guanajuato. Both the Orchestre symphonique de Montreal and Tafelmusik will perform at the festival, which brings together over 2000 artists from 30 different countries and is generally considered to be Latin America’s premiere multidisciplinary festival. The theme of this year’s festival is Galileo Y El Telescopo: 400 AÑOS, named in honour of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009).
The OSM will perform three carefully-chosen works under the direction of Jean-François Rivest at the festival, including Claude Vivier‘s Orion, Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (with the ever-stellar Marc-Andre Hamelin) and Holst‘s The Planets. Tafelmusik will perform its Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres program, a multi-disciplinary event that features the orchestra, astronomers, a stage director, a set and lighting designer, and astronomical photographers. The Cervantino edition of The Galileo Project will broaden Tafelmusik’s reach to Spanish-speaking audiences of the world thanks to the translation of the narrated text from English to Spanish. Assuming the narrator’s role is Mario Iván Martínez, one of Mexico’s most accomplished classically-trained actors who has a parallel career as a singer specializing in early music. Martínez was a member of the prestigious Ars Nova ensemble for 15 years, and his acting roles include Dr. John Brown in the internationally hailed film, Like Water for Chocolate.
For more information about the OSM, you can visit their website here; for more information on Tafelmusik, you can visit their website here.
