Gabriela Montero
Gabriela Montero (born May 10, 1970, Caracas, Venezuela) is a Venezuelan classical pianist who is particularly known for the centrality of improvisation to her performances.
Montero gave her first public piano recital at age five and performed Joseph Haydn’s Piano Concerto in D Major with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela three years later. The Venezuelan government subsequently granted her a scholarship for music studies in the United States. She pursued further training at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Montero became known for solo recitals that included, in addition to standard pieces in the classical piano repertoire, improvisations based on melodies called out by audience members. Montero had introduced improvisation into her performances at the encouragement of the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich. The practice, although rare in modern classical concerts, was commonplace in earlier eras, and such figures as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven were celebrated for their ability to improvise.
Montero was part of the quartet that performed John Williams’s Air and Simple Gifts at the inauguration of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in 2009. She also composed ExPatria (2011), a tone poem for piano and orchestra about corruption and violence in Venezuela. For her advocacy, Amnesty International named Montero an honorary consul in 2015, and three years later the Beethoven Academy in Bonn, Germany, presented to her the International Beethoven Award, which recognizes musicians for their music and dedication to human rights.
She also recorded a number of albums, including Bach & Beyond (2006), Baroque (2007), and Solatino (2010), the latter of which is devoted to works by Latin American composers. Her album released in 2015, featuring ExPatria and Sergey Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, garnered her a Latin Grammy Award for best classical album. She released a recording of her first full-length composition, Piano Concerto No. 1, “Latin” Concerto, in 2019. Montero was the artist-in-residence with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, England (2019–20), and she began a residency at both the Sinfonieorchester Basel, Switzerland, and the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2021.