At age 60, four decades into her career, Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz has arrived. Last year she released Revolución Diamantina, a breathtaking album recorded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel. It won Ortiz three Grammys in February.

Now, the same forces return for Yanga, another arresting recording of Ortiz’s orchestral music that showcases her signature bright colors, vivacious rhythms, tuneful melodies and bold ideas. The album is so good it just might deliver a few more awards to her shelf.

The anchoring work on Yanga is a new cello concerto tailor made for Alisa Weilerstein, who premiered the piece last fall and plays it here with fearless conviction. The concerto’s title, Dzonot, is the Mayan word for the vast underground caves and cisterns found in Mexico’s verdant Yucatan Peninsula. In the opening movement, “Luz Vertical,” you can hear the moment when a shaft of light strikes deep into a cave, glittering on the water, thanks to Ortiz’s translucent combination of winds dancing with harp, piano, celesta and the ping of crotales.

In Dzonot, Ortiz illustrates the vibrancy of the Yucatan’s natural splendor, but also the threat it faces from tourist development. In the movement titled “Jade,” a menacing orchestra roils mechanically, like a machine gobbling up the landscape. In “El Ojo de Jaguar,” an homage to the endangered Mexican jaguar, the rhythms are lither. Ortiz breaks out head-bobbing grooves, utilizing some of the 29 percussion instruments in the score, while instructing Weilerstein to whip up cyclones of jagged bow strokes.

In the best of all possible worlds, Dzonot would quickly enter the cello concerto repertoire. But like much of Ortiz’s recent orchestral music, it’s not a simple score to pull off. Still, an increasing number of Ortiz’s nearly 100 compositions are receiving performances as she finally gets long overdue visibility. She just finished a season as Carnegie Hall’s resident composer and has moved on to the same position with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. It also helps to have champions of your music. Ortiz has these fabulously intuitive performances led by star conductor Dudamel, who describes her as one of the most talented composers in the world.

Growing up in Mexico City, Ortiz was surrounded by folk music. Her parents played in the celebrated Latin American band Los Folkloristas, which frequently held rehearsals in their basement filled with folk instruments. Ortiz pays homage to the music on the new album, specifically to Violeta Parra, who pioneered the socially conscious “Nueva Canción” movement and died by her own hand in 1967. Six Pieces for Violeta brings out a more somber side of Ortiz. The opening movement, “Preludio Andino,” begins with a meandering piano, braided with mysterious strings. “Canto del Agelito” unfolds a Bartok-flavored theme for violin and unnerving, shifting strings, while a low, tolling piano haunts “Amen,” the final section.

Yanga reunites composer Gabriela Ortiz with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Their 2024 album Revolución Diamantina won three Grammy awards earlier this year.
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If Dzonot is concerned with Mexico’s biodiversity, Yanga, the title track, engages with the country’s cultural history. The work tells the story of Gaspar Yanga, a real life 16th century African prince, brought to Mexico as a slave. After his escape, Yanga spent 30 years as a fugitive and a preeminent Robin Hood figure who finally became, as Ortiz puts it in the album liner notes, “the first Black ruler in America.”

The work is a show-stopping spectacle for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Mexican percussion ensemble Tambuco and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, who sings both in Spanish and a dialect from the Congo. Ortiz exploits the chorus almost as another percussion instrument, trading polyrhythmic beats with the Tambuco players on a variety of Afro-Latin instruments including batá drums, shekeres, caxixi and guiros.

This music, for Ortiz, is a shout out to equality and freedom, ideas the composer knows well, having earned her hard-won success. With this outstanding new album, and the Grammy winner from last year, it’s time for the world to finally catch up to the extraordinary music of Gabriela Ortiz.