Valentina Montoya Martínez / Astor Piazzolla and others: La Pasionaria

La Pasionaria, released on the Edinburgh-based label Delphian in April 2013, pairs the Chilean-born, Scotland-based singer and songwriter Valentina Montoya Martínez with Mr McFall’s Chamber, the Edinburgh ensemble known for treating tango, folk and classical repertoire as parts of one continuous musical world rather than separate genres to be kept apart. The album takes its title from La Pasionaria, “the passion flower”, the nickname of Dolores Ibárruri, the Spanish Republican orator whose defiance during the Spanish Civil War made her an enduring symbol for generations of Latin American women involved in political struggle.

Montoya Martínez’s own songs draw directly on her experience as a Chilean exile, including deeply personal material written for her late mother and for Sola Sierra, the Chilean human rights activist and president of the Association of Relatives of the Disappeared-Detained under the Pinochet dictatorship. These sit alongside music from Astor Piazzolla’s tango nuevo tradition, including songs and instrumental interludes drawn from his “operita” María de Buenos Aires, a natural point of contact, since Piazzolla’s own reinvention of tango as a vehicle for both popular song and concert-hall composition runs parallel to what Montoya Martínez and Mr McFall’s Chamber do across the rest of the disc.

About the performers

Mr McFall’s Chamber was founded in Edinburgh in 1996 by double bassist Robert McFall, originally a member of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with the explicit aim of breaking down the usual boundaries between classical chamber music, tango, folk and contemporary composition. Over nearly three decades the group has become one of Scotland’s most distinctive chamber ensembles, as comfortable in a tango club as a concert hall. Valentina Montoya Martínez, performing and recording as part of the wider Voces del Sur project, brings a background rooted specifically in the Chilean exile community’s own song traditions, giving the album’s political and personal material a directness that a purely classical vocal treatment likely couldn’t match.

A note on this page

No original mmmusic review text for this page survived in any archive we could recover, though the page’s existence and its subject are independently confirmed by Voces del Sur’s own website, which lists the original mmmusic review among its press coverage. Rather than guess at what was originally written, the text above has been written fresh from verified facts about the recording and its performers.