Gabriela Montero: Patriot and Pianist

The Venezuelan musician and activist will perform her own concerto with Pacific Symphony in a concert that features Pacific Chorale and includes works by Georges Bizet and Maurice Ravel.

Pianist Gabriela Montero continues to venture into territory where few women have tread: composition. Her “Latin Concerto,” which she will be playing on the Pacific Symphony program, has proved to be a hit with more than 50 live performances. Credit: Photo courtesy of Pacific Symphony

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Impressive Women in the Arts Series | A quick scroll through AI summaries tells the tale. A recent study of the world’s 100 top orchestras found that only 5% of pieces played were written by women composers. Fifty-one percent of visual artists in America are women, yet they are underrepresented in major exhibitions, galleries and museum collections. In some areas of the performing arts, such as dance, women make up a majority (87%), while in others, like music, the representation is roughly equal (49-51%). Still, in certain roles like music production and direction, men outnumber women by a large margin. 

By the numbers, the situation still seems grim but Culture OC editors have noticed that some extraordinary women artists are set to be showcased in Orange County. That’s why this season, we’re dedicating a series to shining a light on visionary new voices who give us hope for the future.

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Outspoken activist. Supermom of two, balancing homelife with a concert career. A classical composer who can improvise a fresh piece as an encore.

Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero continues to write the symphony of her life in the key of F, for fearless.

She’s judging the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, she’s an artist-in-residence at the Cleveland Institute of Music, she’s played with the greatest orchestras in the most famous concert halls in the world.

The Pianist Who Refused to Go Quiet

Next week she’s appearing with the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, reuniting with the orchestra’s newly appointed artistic and music director designate Alexander Shelley, whom she has known for 15 years.

“The very last concert I gave in Venezuela, that's where I met him,” she said in a recent telephone interview, referring to a 2010 performance. “That was the last time I was home.” Typically, upbeat and engaging, she spoke with a hint of sadness, admitting that she still pines for her home country, a land of abundant resources such as oil, coffee and cocoa, now mired in violence and political strife.

Ask and she renders a brutally honest briefing of two decades of electoral fraud.

“In 2024, Venezuelans voted for a democracy, and we voted (Nicolás) Maduro out,” she said. “We know that by a landslide, we won, and that was proven to the world. So, the situation that we have now is a de facto dictator who has been unmasked once and for all since that electoral defeat, who stayed in power. What we're trying to do, and what we desperately need to do, is to be rid of him.” 

If Montero sounds like a strident stateswoman, know that she is as much a patriot for her country as Ignacy Jan Paderewski was for Poland, but her courage comes at a price. She lives in self-imposed exile because she knows she would not be safe if she were to return.

When Art and Allegiance Collide

And it has cost her at least one dear relationship. She and fellow countryman Gustavo Dudamel, with whom she has collaborated many times in the past, do not see eye to eye on the situation. “It's not that I don't agree with Gustavo, it's just that he has a very clear position regarding the Venezuelan government. These are his friends. And I am fighting against this.”

Montero explained that her stance in no way colors her professional opinion of Dudamel, who will begin his term as music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026. “When it comes to being Venezuelan and his responsibility in all of this, I am very aware of the role that he has played in disseminating the message of Chavismo (the ideology of former leader Hugo Chavez) around the world,” she said. “So, irrespective of how brilliant he might be as a musician, for me, it's more important who you are as a human being.”

Those who have attended her concerts shouldn’t be surprised by her words. On stage, Montero, the third-prize winner of the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1995, is just as powerful and articulate. Her insightful performances of masterworks by J.S. Bach, Franz Liszt, Sergei Rachmaninoff and other musical titans would be enough to secure any pianist’s reputation.

But Montero has a unique voice. She adds to the canon by championing Spanish and Latin American composers such as Alberto Ginastera, Manuel de Falla and Enrique Granados and bringing to light little-known works composed by the late Spanish piano virtuoso Alicia de Larrocha. Recently she’s been salting in pieces from Albéniz’s magnum opus Iberia to her repertoire.

Moreover, Montero continues to venture into territory where few women have tread: composition. Her “Latin Concerto,” which she will be playing on the Pacific Symphony program, has proved to be a hit with more than 50 live performances. A crowd pleaser, its first and last movements speak to the New World, with syncopated rhythms and colorful timbres in shades of Leonard Bernstein and Silvestre Revueltas. The long, lyrical melodies of its inner movement unfurl as romantically as any by Astor Piazzolla, accompanied by rich textures reminiscent of Rachmaninoff.

But her concerto didn’t start out that way. She wrote two completely different pieces first and then wasn’t afraid to pivot when she realized audiences needed something a bit more approachable.

First, she penned an overtly political orchestral poem for piano and orchestra called Ex Patria, Op. 1 “In memoriam,” which premiered in 2011. She called it “a crushing work,” difficult to perform with a direct emotional connection to the suffering of Venezuela. A few years later, she wrote “Babel,” a piece for piano and string orchestra about the frustration of speaking in a noisy world where no one listens. She found it impossible to deliver a message with that piece as well. 

“When I decided to write the Latin Concerto, I wanted to write a piece that would allow me, again, to speak about what was happening in Venezuela, but in a way that was not as confrontational. So, it's very much a piece about Latin America and the beautiful characteristics of that part of the world that people love … the music, the food, the fun. I always say that people don't want anyone to mess with their mojito,” she said with a laugh.

Now 55, Montero is a serious artist, but she’s always believed music should be entered into with abundant joy. For her, it began as child’s play. According to her parents, she started at 7 months old, picking out melodies of lullabies her mother sang to her on a two-octave toy keyboard in her crib. She began taking lessons at 4 and was encouraged to study music in the U.S. on a Venezuelan scholarship, arriving in Miami when she was only 9 years old.

But 10 years of concertizing in Europe and the U.S., while studying with a teacher who traumatized her, didn’t kill her independent spirit. Instead, it made her determined to walk away from her budding career for two years to rebuild. Her entire family had to return to Venezuela, and eventually young Gabriela was living with that teacher and it just became too much.

Breaking, Rebuilding and Finding Her Own Sound

“My experience of being with her for almost 10 years, since I was a child, was so devoid of inspiration and beauty that I just felt like a performing monkey. And I stopped playing,” she said. “When I came back, it was sort of on my own terms.”

Montero accepted a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music and had married a Colombian man who was a bartender. He didn’t like living in London, so that was soon over. But she stayed to study with Hamish Milne, who brought music back into her life. Then, after the Chopin Competition, she took time off again. She was into her second marriage and raising two children who are now in their 20s. She was also considering a gutsy move in a completely different direction – a career in psychology.

But her prodigious, multi-faceted talent could not be denied. One fateful night she went to hear Argentine pianist Martha Argerich, a fellow prodigy and human rights advocate, in Montreal. She had met her before and wanted to talk to her, not about music but about how she handled family and career – Argerich had three children. Montero braced herself, went backstage and was grateful Argerich remembered her.

Montero asked to meet for coffee, Argerich asked to hear her play and some words of encouragement from the grande dame was all it took for Montero to find the fortitude to make a permanent comeback. Even in challenging times, such as after her second divorce, when she was a single mother for 12 years, her trajectory toward stardom never faltered.

She simply kept concertizing and facing life’s challenges as they unfolded around her hectic schedule. If not for a concert date in 2010 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Dudamel, she wouldn’t have met her current husband, Irish singer Sam McElroy. He attended the show, went out for coffee at Starbucks the next day and she walked in five minutes later. “He’s a baritone, a wonderful artist,” she said. That fateful coffee bar wasn’t even close to the area where he lived. “So, it was serendipitous, just incredible,” she said.

As an artist in residence in Cleveland, Montero has a small studio of five students and she teaches them to meet the most difficult repertoire head-on the way she does, especially the women. “I have to give them permission to be daring and sometimes brutal, depending on the repertoire. And to be all these different characteristics that don't come naturally to the female temperament,” she said. “When you play Shostakovich and Prokofiev, well, there are many little monsters with teeth that come out. So, you have to be able to embody that.”

Montero doesn’t give instruction in improvisation because she’s convinced it can’t be taught. Still, she wouldn’t dream of presenting an encore that wasn’t improvised, because her fans have come to demand it. Listen to her take on Johann Pachelbel’s Canon. No matter how many times you’ve endured it at friends’ weddings, you’ll become a convert as she pulls new insights from its harmonies seemingly out of thin air.

“I do encourage my students to see the score as a (type of) storytelling. And you're the narrator,” she says. “And improvisation is, of course, the language. In my case, I always spoke that language. I don't know how, I don't know why. But I think it's that relationship with music that is very personal, and that's very much about storytelling. That connects the world of improvisation to the world of playing the repertoire.”

Improviser, Advocate, Visionary

Montero continues to make musical connections, forging new friendships and keeping up with old ones such as with Shelley, stressing that Orange County is fortunate to have him. “He's such a star, an incredible musician and an incredible human being,” she said. “I find him to be so caring about not just the music and the detail, but the people that make up that community.” 

Named an Honorary Consul by Amnesty International in 2015 and the recipient of the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2024, she brings as much passion to causes of social justice as she does bravura to her music making. 

Montero keeps taking her career in new directions while following her moral compass, which she says has yet to steer her wrong. “I think my life has been a constant search (for) the why,” she said. “That has led me to not only do what I do, but also become involved in activism, which has been the most difficult thing I've ever done. Because you have to confront not only the most amazing aspects of humanity, but also the most horrific ones as well, so it's always the why that leads me to all these different avenues.”

‘Shelley Conducts Carmen and Daphnis and Chloé’ 

Program: Alexander Shelley leads the Pacific Symphony in Bizet’s Carmen Suite No. 1, arranged by Ernest Guiraud; Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloé,” featuring the Pacific Chorale; and “Latin Concerto,” by Gabriela Montero, who will join the orchestra as piano soloist. 

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Nov. 20-22. A preview talk with KUSC midday host Alan Chapman begins at 7 p.m.

Where: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

Tickets: $36–$252. 

Information: 714-755-5799 or visit pacificsymphony.org