The world knows Leticia Moreno as an award-winning violinist who has carved out a stellar career touring the globe with some of the finest names in classical music. But Moreno sees music as much more than a profession. For her it’s a form of cultural activism, a lifestyle devoted to learning about other places and composers and styles, and bringing Spanish and Latin American repertoire to new audiences.
Moreno will continue that journey in May in her first-ever appearance with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, playing Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto no. 2 under the baton of Hans Graf, as part of the conductor’s farewell series with the orchestra as his seven-year tenure comes to an end. Though she’s a devotee of the piece and an admirer of Graf, the appeal of the performance runs much deeper for her.
“I am extremely happy to be playing with the orchestra and Maestro Graf, I’m a big fan of his work,” she says. “I’ve never been to Singapore, so I am also really looking forward to being there. For me, the possibility to visit other cultures, and connect with the public and musicians of different backgrounds, is one of the biggest gifts and joys you can have in life.”
Moreno’s passion for her native music has made her a powerful advocate for the Spanish repertoire. It’s evident on her CD Spanish Landscapes, which offers a mix of well-known and overlooked Spanish composers; in her ongoing chamber project ‘Bach in the Jungle’, which juxtaposes European Baroque and modern Latin American music; and most eloquently in her partnership with Peruvian composer Jimmy López Bellido, whose violin concerto Aurora, commissioned by the Houston Symphony and dedicated to Moreno, has garnered international acclaim, receiving a Grammy nomination.
“In the Spanish and Latin American communities, this should be our commitment, to showcase this kind of work,” she says. “We have an intuitive sense of the music’s real flavor and should bring it to the world.”
While the Szymanowski concerto lies well outside of those efforts, it has a Latin connection for Moreno and a prominent place in her repertoire. In 2012, she made her debut with the Simon Bólivar Orchestra in Caracas playing both of Szymanowski’s violin concertos (Nos. 1 and 2) back-to-back in one evening.
“I learned both of them for that occasion, and I’ve been playing them ever since,” she says. “It was very intense, but a formative musical experience for me. Especially playing in South America, which is always a happiness. My mother is Spanish and my father is Peruvian, so I feel at home in both places.”
Moreno enjoys playing Szymanowski: “His way of composing is just so rich and so luminous and transformative,” she says. But not surprisingly, what she relates to most in his music are the cultural connections.
“I have to work a lot to arrive at a connection with No. 1, where he was fascinated with other cultures outside of Poland,” she says. “In No. 2 he comes back to his own culture, his own earth, his own story. I can identify with that in a piece because of the deep connection that I have with my own mother culture.”
When it comes to Spanish repertoire, it’s not enough for Moreno to be playing well-known composers like Isaac Albéniz and Manuel de Falla. She is on what she calls a “lifelong quest” to bring the work of forgotten Spanish composers to light. This effort started early in her career, when she set aside a week to search for manuscripts. She eventually unearthed a violin sonata by Enrique Granados and Joaquín Turina’s El Poema De Una Sanluqueña, both of which appear on her Spanish Landscapes CD.
“It’s a great pleasure for me to discover overlooked music from my culture and be an advocate for it,” Moreno says. “That’s an honor and commitment I am very happy to pursue for the rest of my days.”
Moreno is also eager to enlarge the repertoire, which she and Jimmy López Bellido have done with Aurora. Their collaboration now seems fated, though it started as a stroke of serendipity. Both knew of the other, and they shared a mutual admiration for each other’s work, but it wasn’t until 2017 that they actually met. López had just taken a position as composer-in-residence with the Houston Symphony, and conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada suggested that for his first piece, he write a concerto for Moreno.
López dug out some drafts of a violin concerto inspired by the Northern Lights that he had begun as a student in Finland, and started exchanging emails and phone calls with Moreno. To finish the piece, he traveled to Valencia to work with her in person, an arrangement reminiscent of the collaboration that Szymanowski had with violinist Paweł Kochański in composing his concertos.
“It was one of the most intense and rewarding collaborations I have ever had,” López said in program notes written for the May 2019 premiere of Aurora. “Leticia did not limit herself to performing the piece; she helped me shape it. Thanks to her, it is richer, more challenging and more idiomatically written for the violin. When she steps onstage, she will own the concerto in a way that is only possible when a performer works in cooperation with a living composer.”
“It’s one of the most challenging pieces I’ve ever performed,” Moreno says. “I had to develop new muscles to play it.” She recalls being backstage with López before a performance with the Houston Symphony that was recorded (for digital release), feeling almost overwhelmed by the complexity of work. “I was not sure I could manage it. But he kept encouraging me – it turned out to be a wonderful recording, I’m very proud of it.”
Moreno and López have become close friends and ambassadors for the piece, taking it throughout the Americas. There have also been performances in Europe, with more to come. Eventually, they hope to take it to Asia as well. “It’s been very rewarding, the audience reactions have been absolutely amazing,” Moreno says. “For me, it’s a thrill to perform it and rediscover it by taking it to different cultures.”
She and López are discussing future projects, though nothing they are ready to divulge yet. In the meantime, along with appearances as a guest soloist, Moreno is keeping busy with her chamber music project Bach in the Jungle. She and several colleagues play a program of Bach, Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla that draws on ‘Missionary Baroque’, a musical hybrid that emerged in Latin America during the Spanish conquest of the 17th and 18th centuries. Jesuit missionaries found European music an effective way to make the Catholic religion more palatable to indigenous people they were trying to convert, and local variations developed.
Bach serves as the foundation for the program, in particular the Chaconne from his Partita no. 2 in D minor, a dance form popularised in the New World which became one of the cornerstones of the violin repertoire. Sonata Chiquitana no. 4, an anonymous 18th-century work recovered from musical archives in Bolivia, demonstrates the blend of Baroque forms with local aesthetics. And Villa-Lobos and Piazzolla provide modern examples of the distinctive forms in Latin music.
“The Chaconne is the heart of the project and one of the most important works in all of music,” Moreno says. “Beyond that, I think we should all be more aware of Missionary Baroque. It was a rich source of creation, there are many wonderful things to discover there.”
More than anything, Bach in the Jungle reflects the central preoccupation that drives Moreno’s work and life – cross-cultural exploration and exchanges. Asked to assess her career up to now, she returns to that theme.
“I am very grateful and absolutely delighted to be traveling the world, communicating through music and creating new connections,” she says. “Finding repertoire from so many different sources, creating projects, playing with such wonderful, inspiring colleagues – I couldn’t wish for more. I am looking forward very much to continuing that process.”
Leticia Moreno performs Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra on 7th–8th May.
See upcoming performances by Leticia Moreno and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
This article was sponsored by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
