5th Collaboration in Canton Features Mexico Pieces
Our March 2023 concert with the Canton Symphony Orchestra will mark Westwater Arts’s 5th collaboration with the CSO. For this season—the CSO’s 85th!—we’re pulling out all the stops in their renovated Zimmermann Symphony Center with our vibrant and popular Mexico pieces: Pre~Columbia & Mágico.
Following a festive first half featuring latin-inspired music by Gershwin, Still, Copland and Ballard, the second half opens with the Pre~Columbia visual concerto set to the dramatic first movement of Revueltas’s La Noche de los Mayas. The visual piece is a 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 jungle 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 important scene-setting is the two-part Mágico. That piece has multiple music options, and in Canton we’re going with a lively combination featuring Chávez’s Sinfonía india 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, festivities and facets of life from 18 Mexican states. Coincidentally, when Nicholas was in the middle of his Mexico production one of his concerts back in the states was in Canton, at the time with the World War pieces. Surely Nicholas gushing about his experiences down in Mexico helped to plant a future seed about this upcoming performance. 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, during one of the best years of my life.”
Nicholas will be live-cuing all of the Mexico imagery as the CSO performs under the direction of Associate Conductor Matthew Jenkins Jaroszewicz. It will be an absolutely memorable night and we expect to see plenty of new faces out in the audience. For some in Canton, the visuals in the Mexico pieces will be a connection to places they grew up in or where their families have visited or have roots. For those with more limited experience of Mexico, they often instill a greater appreciation for Mexico’s natural beauty, kind people, and rich cultural life that Mexican citizens cherish deeply. We’re so happy that these pieces are inspiring thoughts of “I didn’t realize Mexico had…” conversations all over the U.S….and soon in Ohio!
