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Music Extra: Gabriela Montero: Improvisation Masterclass

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Gabriela Montero - Venezuelan Pianist

29/04/2017 GMT

Gabriela Montero: Improvisation Masterclass

BBC World Service - Music Extra, Gabriela Montero: Improvisation Masterclass

Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero takes us to the heart of her music

Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero takes us to the heart of her music.

Gabriela Montero, the exhilarating Venezuelan pianist, is playing in Miami. She is renowned for her live improvisations, a form of classical music that’s rarely heard in concert halls today.

Her spontaneous compositions on stage are inspired by musical motifs, sung or hummed to her by a member of the audience, often drawn from the classical repertoire, but also from the local folk traditions of any given audience. She is increasingly recognised for her talent and the direct communication she creates with her audience in what is a breath-taking display of virtuosity and creativity.

Composer Llywelyn Ap Myrddin lets his classically trained hair down and travels to meet her and discover the life and work of this unusual and brilliant woman.

Montero is living in exile in Spain. It is partly a demonstration against the current regime, but also as we’ll hear, it’s simply too dangerous to live and work in Venezuela.

As a child prodigy in Caracas, she was invited to perform piano concertos with the famous EL Sistema youth orchestra - El Sistema’s motto translates as “social action through music”. It remains a country wide initiative that claims to take poor young people off the streets and inspire them through music. The concerts given around the world are renowned for their incredible vitality and colour in all the senses, but increasingly Gabriela and fellow Venezuelan musicians including Luis Julio Toro are critical, given that El Sistema is now controlled by central government and the strategic performances are being used as "a kind of Disney propaganda" to cover for the terrible failure of the present government.

With leading classical musician and improviser, Robert Levin, Venezuelan flautist Luis Julio Toro and British jazz musician Laura Jurd.

(Photo: Gabriela Montero. Credit: Shelly Mosman)

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