web analytics
Categories
Art Autobiography Music

“El Orador”

silvia-piano

Before I was born my mother used to practice El Orador (YouTube audio here): a piece for piano composed by my father.

Throughout her pregnancy I happened to be a couple of inches from the piano’s keys, in embryonic state! My mother once told me that while practicing that piece I moved vigorously in her womb. I have this music amalgamated to my soul…

El Orador (The Orator) is a fantasia for piano that my father composed in 1952 and was performed for the first time by María Teresa Rodríguez, and then by my mother (photo above) in 1958, in private gatherings, after I was born.

Father Vértiz, a Catholic priest with eloquent oratory power had inspired the music of my father. According to my parents, the priest’s sermons were like a parable: they initiated in adages and after crescendos culminated in a violent rhetoric that captivated the faithful.

15 replies on ““El Orador””

Of course: my father has composed also music for the full orchestra, once with my mother playing the piano in the US premiere in Utica, NY when I was a small child.

Utica NY

This is what music critic Chuck Robie Booth wrote in that paper:

THE PROGRAM opened 20 minutes late, with the U.S. premiere of Cesar Tort’s “Estirpes,” an extremely complex and rewarding poem of pretty piano patterns, dissonant raindroppy effects and variously paced strings.

Silvia O. de Tort (the composer’s wife) did very well on the difficult piano parts. The number has piano bass notes, tympani, brass and woodwinds all competing for recognition in a pulsating, sometimes weird, structure not unlike some of Miklos Rosza’s works.

The words of the conductor Jose Serebrier about Estirpes were even more complimentary. I have the interview somewhere in my archives.

Unfortunately, the video is private. Would you please either make it available to your readers or remove the link. Thank you.

Your mother is very beautiful…. so what happened to you? Did your face get run over by a car? Or, by a pick-up truck?

Addendum: oh, by the way, your mother’s phenotype is Arabid. She looks purely Iberic in terms of her hertiage but Semitic influence is obvious.

Because of his looks, my mother speculates that the ancestors of her father Antonio came from a Christian though Arabic family. Since my grandfather Antonio died in 1950, long before I was born, I never interacted with him, but I can ask again to my mother and uncle about his ancestry. All I can say for now is that her Arabic looks come from the Ovando family line in Puebla (Mexico) rather than from the Ortega line in her family.

Interesting. I musk ask… do White Mexicans face racism from the Injun and mestizo scum making up most of Mexico’s population? Also, is Mexico really as bad as it’s portrayed in the American media? Usually when I hear news about Mexico it entails the cartel engaging in criminality or how impoverished Mexico is overall.

Comments are closed.