Gabriela Montero's ‘Latin’ Piano Concerto by Shaw, C., Montero, G., Brahms, ket 03 spa 2024, Nuo (2024/2024), Dirigentas Elim Chan, City Halls, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Gabriela Montero is the virtuoso who broke the mould - the Venezuelan pianist whose irrepressible imagination and flair for improvisation has put creativity back into the heart of the classical piano repertoire. “For me, music is a purposeful art”, she says, and today she stars in her own, exuberant Latin Concerto: not, she says, “a naïve vision of a carnival continent“ but “a profoundly personal expression of the continent in which I was born”. Guest conductor Elim Chan frames it with classics old and new - Caroline Shaw’s 21st century tribute to the music of the classical era, and Brahms’s mighty final symphony: an old master singing, dancing and raging against the dying of the light.