MINING SYMPHONY
Summer season 2025
What does the music tell us?
In the Summer Season 2025 of the Sinfónica de Minería we have constructed a fascinating sonic narrative that seeks to answer one of the most poignant and enigmatic human questions:
What does the music tell us?
Gabriela Ortiz, Rachmaninov, Marquez and Silvestre Revueltas
To Gabriela Ortiz he says: "take these secrets about uncreated territories".
It takes her to the caves, turquoise waters and sounds of the Huasteca region. She writes Téeneckwhere limits are mere inventions and sound is the force that unites us in the identification of differences.
To Sergey Rachmaninov he says: "your fascination with the Dies irae is uncontrollable".
He integrates it, almost without realizing it, in his Symphonic Dancesbut disfigured in libettad. Macabre silhouettes that cross morning, noon and night going towards jazz.
To Arturo Márquez he says: "something, someone, is taking care of us".
In his Mystic and profane concert he writes in the second movement a serenade that is agitated, bombastic, in courage and violence, to end in charge of the soft voice of a guitar in serene meditation.
To Silvestre Revueltas he says: "repeat Sensemayá many times to be able to hypnotize snakes".
Mining Symphony's Summer Season 2025
What does the music tell us, a foundational question whose poetics articulates the eight programs and the gala that from July 4 to August 31 at the Sinfónica de Minería we perform every week at the Nezahualcóyotl Concert Hall.
Our Summer Season 2025 is cohesive in a bewitching way.
The works that comprise it are intimately linked in the fact that all of them, without even trying, just by being, rehearse answers to one of the most consoling and arcane human questions:
What does music tell us, where the mystery of the eternal is enclosed.
Liberson, Musórgsky, Saariaho and Brahms
To Peter Lieberson he says, "this love, love, it's not over...."
Dedicates to him Songs of Neruda to his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt. She records and premieres them in 2005. He dies the following year and the poem is completed: "... (this love) as it had no birth, it has no death".
To Modest Musórgsky, he says: "to trace a star with sounds: use the lyric saxophone".
That for the room of the Pictures of an exhibitionwhich is called The old castle. In the second one, he uses the double bass to describe how the powerful jaws of a Gnome sinister crush walnut shells.
To Kaija Saariaho he says: "here you have two harps to describe the Winter sky".
The percussions are thunder. Then, when it begins to rain, the instruments acquire more sophisticated functions related to the sensuality of the drops: undulating movement (oboe), softness (flute), gelidity (bassoon) and insistence (piccolo).
To Johannes Brahms he says, on the occasion of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2: "The softer and softer grows your dream.your dream grows softer and softer".
Mahler's Third Symphony: What Love Tells Us
Then it happens, halfway through the season, that as an orchestra we find it inevitable to endow the question with an intimate influence:
To the Mining Symphony, what does the music tell us?
The first thought is about time: almost half a century of existence. But the sound is rust-free. It does not age. On the contrary: the constancy of the years embellishes it.
So we listen to the music and what the music tells us is:
"Accept the challenge to perform one of the most ambitious, perplexing, complex, revealing and beautiful symphonies ever written."
So we programmed Mahler's Third Symphony, where the music comprehensively narrates the experience of being alive. He wrote it during his affair with Alma Schindler and premiered it just after they were married. He was tempted to call it What love tells me.
Within his catalog he occupies the middle ground between a conceptual trilogy of choral symphonies. In the Second, he resurrects the hero he killed in the First and takes him to Paradise in the Fourth. So this Third is the hero's life on earth.
It is divided into six movements. to which Mahler originally assigned names that he later deleted:
- Summer comes into action
On the inexorable existence of the sun. A trombone solo describes the appearance of light. - What the flowers of the meadow tell me.
About the overwhelming power of colors. The wind shakes the purple, yellow, red and white petals to the rhythm of a minuet. - What the creatures of the forest tell me.
About being born, disappearing and being born again. Ghostly trumpet interludes sound in the distance, offstage. - What the Night Tells Me.
On the unbearable fragility in the face of the inexplicable. The ochre voice of a contralto sings passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche:
“What does the deep midnight say?
(…) Sorrow says: Go on!”
But every pleasure longs for eternity
It craves deep, deep eternity!” - What the morning bells tell me.
About the presence of angels. Girls and boys sing Bim Bam with the softness of their white voices. - What love tells me.
On tenderness as our greatest gift. Slow, quiet and heartfelt adagio (Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden).
Sinfónica de Minería: bastion of Mexican music
The Mahlerian musical revolution was one of approach, not of language. He inherited tonality. He explored its frontiers. Although he never broke it as an ideal language, he did turn the symphonic fact into an all-encompassing and all-containing world: great feats and futile waltzes, songs to the earth and heavenly dreams, tragic premonitions and masked dances, tormenting memories and oaths without substance, ecstatic laughter and loves beyond death, destruction and resurrections, indecipherable doubts and gossip, daily bliss and horseback rides, innocent frolic and millenarian pains.
This intense, contradictory vitality is especially poignant in his Third.
To go towards it is to test your existence as an orchestra.
An existence that, in the case of the Sinfónica de Minería, finds meaning in its Mexican roots. Since our founding in 1978, we have commissioned and premiered more than 50 works by Mexican composers. In this Summer Season 2025, we premiere Symphony No. 1, MyGreat Dream, by Juan Pablo Contrerasa work full of wit, humor and nostalgia. For example, the four low strings of an electric guitar are tuned in the manner of a cello (C-G-G-R-E) to describe the heavy heart Mexican heavy heart of living in the United States ("mygreat", so together to make "migrate" sound), with a wild clarinet solo included, under the strident, vertiginous poetics of a Metallica song.
Dvořák, John Adams and Stravinski.
What does the music tell us?
To Antonín Dvořák he says: "the New World is covered with millennia-old layers of acedia".
In the third movement, after reading The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow, he writes a solo for English horn in which he describes how, as the white birch canoe glides under a cascade of laughing water, a rainbow is painted in the sky symbolizing the bridge between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
A John Adams says: "it's time for you to conduct your own music in Mexico".
He chooses his Concerto for violin and orchestra, in whose second movement the solo instrument acquires a ghostly mission: to be "the body through which the dream flows", as Robert Haas' poem says.
To Stravinski he says: "destroy the giant egg that is the origin of black magic".
And creates with sounds a Bird of fire, with leafy wings whose feathers flicker like flames, who saves the world by singing a lullaby by the bassoon that lulls the sorcerer Kastchei and allows him to bring down the figures of evil through imagination.
The healing power of music
At the Mining Symphony we are convinced of the healing power of music.
music.
We believe that music is a powerful tool for healing and infusion.
hope.
Our mission is to collaborate in the construction of a more inclusive, empathetic and tolerant society through the performance of symphonic concerts of excellence.
Music is an essential part of life.
We turn to her in happiness and in sadness.
It is an inexhaustible source of illusions and nostalgia.
A symphony orchestra gives us the possibility to experience this wealth of emotions in a communal way.
What does the Hymn of Joy today?
By creating in his Ninth the first choral symphony in history, Beethoven's revolution was one of brotherhood. Where everything used to be instrumental texture, he included the human voice to sing:
"Your magic brings back together what custom has divided;
all humans become brothers where your gentle wing rests.
(...) embrace each other, millions of beings! This kiss is for the whole world!".
That is why in the gala that ends our Summer Season 2025, at the Minería Symphony we asked you, who have accompanied us in this fascinating existential sound journey:
