Día de Los Muertos Concerts in South Bend
There’s a lot to look forward to in South Bend in early November. Our double concert series with Maestro Alastair Willis and the South Bend Symphony Orchestra brings two of our most popular and festive pieces to the Morris Performing Arts Center. Pre~Columbia and Mágico explore both ancient and modern Mexico in music and imagery. The pieces originally premiered with the Dallas Symphony for a special concert in collaboration with the Mexican Consulate following a yearlong photographic production in Mexico. And in South Bend, our concerts are centered around the Día de Los Muertos holiday.
Pre~Columbia is choreographed to the dramatic first movement of Revueltas’s La Noche de los Mayas. The visual piece is an homage to Mexico’s ancient roots with a journey through the imposing ruins left behind by its sophisticated Mesoamerican civilizations. Ancient cities spread across the dense jungles and high plateaus like Palenque, Chichén Itzá, Monte Albán, Uxmal, Ek’ Balam, and Teotihuacán tell a story that is indelibly woven into Mexico’s present-day cultural traditions.
Following Pre~Columbia’s scene-setting is the two-part Mágico. This piece has multiple music options, and in South Bend we’re going with a lively combination featuring Copland’s El Salón México and Moncayo’s Huapango. The imagery for Mágico presents a colorful tapestry of the people, places, festivals, and everyday details that make contemporary Mexico such a fascinating and diverse country.
To produce Pre~Columbia and Mágico, Westwater Arts Multimedia Artist Nicholas Bardonnay spent a year living and photographing in Mexico where he captured places, portraiture, festivities and facets of life from 18 Mexican states. And what an experience it was. Nicholas describes the project as “the most dynamic and logistically challenging project I’ve ever photographed, but it was a labor of love and I consider it a thank-you gift to the wonderful people I met along the way.”
Each of our two concerts in South Bend will have slightly different programming. Our Saturday, November 1 evening concert features Pre~Columbia and Mágico on the first half, then closes with Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Our Sunday, November 2 matinee is a shorter community-focused program and will feature a selection of our visual pieces as well as Chicago’s beloved Sones de México Ensemble and a local folklórico dance group. In both cases, Nicholas will be live-cuing the choreographed Mexico imagery as the SBSO performs under the direction of Maestro Willis.
It will be a memorable couple of days and we expect to see plenty of new faces out in the audience. For some in South Bend, the visuals in the Mexico pieces will be a connection to places they grew up or their families have roots. For those with more limited experience of Mexico, Pre~Columbia and Mágico often instill a greater appreciation for Mexico’s natural beauty, kind people, and rich cultural heritage that Mexican citizens cherish deeply. We’re so happy that these pieces have been inspiring thoughts of “I didn’t realize Mexico had…” conversations all over the U.S….and soon in South Bend!
