The Minería Symphony Orchestra’s 2026 Summer Season reaches its third program, with a question common to all three works: What happens when music decides to portray something that lies beyond itself?
The Italian Caprice by Tchaikovsky transforms a city into sound. "Altar of Wind" by Gabriela Ortiz transforms an invisible element into musical architecture. The Enigma Variations by Elgar turn real people into orchestral portraits and also conceal a theme that no one has been able to decipher.
Program 3 will be performed on Saturday, July 18, at 8:00 p.m. and on Sunday, July 19, at 12:00 p.m., in the Silvestre Revueltas Hall at the Ollin Yoliztli Cultural Center. Giancarlo Guerrero will conduct as guest conductor, and Alejandro Escuer will be the guest soloist in *Altar de viento*. Here are some tips to help you enjoy every moment of the program even more.
Italian Caprice, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: When Rome Became Music
In late 1879, Tchaikovsky traveled to Rome and stayed at the Hotel Costanzi. From there, he could hear the fanfares coming from nearby military barracks, the melodies echoing through the streets, and the dance rhythms that filled the city’s atmosphere. From that immediate experience was born the Italian Caprice, composed between January 16 and May 27, 1880.
Tchaikovsky himself explained the nature of the work in a letter to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck: “Thanks to the charming themes—some of which I have taken from folk collections, while others I have heard on the streets—this work will be very effective.” The caprice is a free form, and in this case it can also be heard as a rhapsody: a piece built on national-style themes and motifs that flow naturally one after another.
The piece opens with a broad, solemn fanfare played by the trumpets, immediately taken up by the entire brass section. The strings respond with a long, solemn melody, accented by the brass and then by the woodwinds, leading to a first climax. Afterward, the music changes in character: a section with the feel of a folk dance in triple meter appears, featuring pairs of woodwinds, followed by a lyrical episode with a tambourine. Later on, the final saltarello accelerates the music toward a brilliant and martial conclusion, with an imitation of a pastoral bagpipe by the woodwinds that provides one of the piece’s most colorful moments.
An Italian Whim premiered in Moscow on December 18, 1880. Tchaikovsky also left a trace of his trip in another unexpected document: a letter to the manager of the Hotel Costanzi, in which he reminded him, with a touch of irony, that he always paid for his dinner even if he didn’t eat it.
Altar of Wind, by Gabriela Ortiz: the flute as the breath of the world
Gabriela Ortiz is one of the world's most renowned composers, and Altar of Wind is part of a series of works she has been developing for years: musical altars dedicated to different elements or images. Before the wind came neon, the dead, stone, fire, and light; next would come strings and brass. Each altar stems from a different inspiration, and the wind altar, according to Ortiz herself, was born from “the poetic imagination and its relationship with the wind and sound.”
The central image of the work lies in an equivalence: wind and sound share the same nature. Both can be heard and felt, but not seen; both are repositories of mystery and invisible power. And the flute, one of humanity’s oldest instruments, literally transforms air into music: the flutist blows, the column of air vibrates inside the instrument, and sound emerges. As Ortiz summarizes in his note on the work: “For Alejandro (referring to flutist Alejandro Escuer, to whom he dedicated the solo part), his instrument is not actually the flute, but the wind.”
The concerto has four movements that are arranged in two contrasting pairs. "Wind Light", the first, and "Night Wind", the third, are inspired by two haikus by the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho: “Out in the open / the wind seeps through / into my soul” and “It has hidden / in the bamboo grove / the winter wind.” These movements have a more contemplative and intimate character. “Geometry of the Air”, the second, and Tornado, the fourth, are based on more concrete musical ideas and explore a dialogue of greater virtuosity and rhythmic force between the soloist and the orchestra.
An important detail: in the first, second, and fourth movements, Escuer plays the standard C-flute, but in the third movement, "Night Wind", the composer calls for the G-flute and, optionally, the alto flute. This change of instrument also represents a change in timbre: a lower, darker tone that corresponds to the nocturnal character of Basho’s haiku.
Altar de viento premiered on November 29, 2015, with Alejandro Escuer as soloist and the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Juan Carlos Lomónaco.
Alejandro Escuer, soloist
Alejandro Escuer is a Mexican flutist, composer, improviser, and multidisciplinary artist, and a leading figure in contemporary music. The New York Times described him as a “rewarding, seductive, and imaginative” artist (…) “who evokes Latin American instruments to remarkable effect.”
He is the founder of the ÓNIX Ensemble and the Lumínico project, and throughout his career he has had more than 150 works premiered in his honor. His project “Flute and Orchestra XXI” has premiered eleven concertos by composers such as Arturo Márquez, Gabriela Ortiz, Enrico Chapela, David Dzubay, and Eric Nathan, alongside orchestras in Latin America and the United States. His discography includes more than thirty albums for Urtext Digital Classics/Naxos, featuring works for solo flute, electronics, multimedia, and electroacoustic and immersive formats.
Among his accolades are grants from FONCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and BBVA; the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Award; two Latin Grammy nominations; and his induction into the National System of Art Creators.
Enigma Variations, by Edward Elgar: Portraits, Cryptography, and an Unsolved Mystery
Edward Elgar had a little-known hobby: cryptography. He was neither an expert nor a professional, but he enjoyed encrypted messages, wordplay, and secret codes. That hobby is at the origin of the Enigma Variations, his most famous work, which premiered in London on June 19, 1899.
The enigma of the work is, in fact, twofold. The first was revealed after the composer’s death in 1934: the 14 variations are musical portraits of people close to Elgar, and their identities remained hidden during his lifetime. The second mystery remains unsolved: Elgar stated that the true mystery lay in the inclusion of another hidden theme, hinted at as a counter-theme in all the variations but never explicitly presented. Music lovers, musicologists, and enthusiasts have been searching for it for over a century. The most plausible hypothesis points to “Auld Lang Syne,” the old Scottish song, but no one has been able to confirm it.
The characters portrayed offer a brief glimpse into Elgar’s life. His wife, Caroline Alice, opens the series with a lyrical and warm variation that accurately describes her. August Jaeger, in Variation IX, known as Nimrod, receives the most noble and moving portrayal in the entire work: the allusion to the "Pathétique Sonata" appearing there is due, according to Elgar himself, to the memory of a summer night when Jaeger spoke eloquently about Beethoven and his slow movements.
Variation X portrays Dora Penny, a friend of the composer who used to speak hesitantly and with frequent pauses; that quality is directly transcribed into the music. Variation XI features Dan, the dog belonging to organist George Robinson Sinclair, who runs along the banks of the River Wye and falls into the water—one of the most anecdotal and beloved portraits in the work.
And the final variation, No. XIV, is Elgar’s self-portrait: “Edu”—the nickname his wife used—brings the work to a close with a triumphant finale that depicts his struggles and ideals.
The dedication in the score simply reads: “To my friends portrayed here.”
Giancarlo Guerrero, guest conductor
Giancarlo Guerrero is one of the leading figures in the international conducting scene on the international stage, with six Grammy Awards to his credit. The Chicago Tribune highlighted his “creativity both in repertoire selection and in his interpretation,” while BBC Music Magazine has noted the intensity and captivating power he brings out in his orchestras.
As the head of the Nashville Symphony—an orchestra of which he is the distinguished music director—Guerrero commissioned and premiered nearly two dozen works by composers such as Béla Fleck, Ben Folds, Jennifer Higdon, Hannibal Lokumbe, and Terry Riley, in addition to making twenty-one recordings.
In 2025, he began his tenure as artistic director and principal conductor of the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago, and in the 2025–26 season, he took over as music director of the Sarasota Orchestra.
The sounds of Rome, the breath of the wind, the mystery of the portraits
On Saturday, July 18, and Sunday, July 19, the Minería Symphony Orchestra will present a program in which music transcends itself to capture something external: a city, an invisible element, a circle of friends, and a secret that has remained unanswered for over a hundred years.
With Giancarlo Guerrero conducting and Alejandro Escuer as guest soloist, Program 3 of the 2026 Summer Season opens three doors to the orchestral imagination: Tchaikovsky’s journey to Rome, the wind transformed into music by Ortiz and Escuer, and the enigma that Elgar took with him.
We look forward to seeing you on Saturday, July 18, and Sunday, July 19, to discover how a city, the wind, and a century-old secret come together to create an unforgettable symphonic concert.
