Wichita Symphony Orchestra spices up Valentine’s Day with ‘Tango Caliente’
The Wichita Symphony Orchestra is bringing in the heat Saturday night.
“We happen to have the concert hall on Valentine’s Day, it just seemed like the perfect fit,’ WSO executive director Tim Storhoff said of “Tango Caliente,” the pops concert this weekend. “And something like this music, tango music, it’s fun for the orchestra to play, it’s exciting for the audience, and it’s going to be a spectacle.”
“Tango Caliente” features soprano Camille Zamora, who created the concert, on vocals, and professional Argentine dancers Yesica Esquivel and Ariel Leguizamón on stage during the concert.
Zamora created “Tango Caliente” about seven or eight years ago.
“My whole life, I have been a singer, really, since I was tiny,” she recalled in a Zoom interview from her New York City loft. “My father’s family is all musicians, like a lot of Hispanic families. You have every single person, all seven his brothers and sisters played instruments, and so for me, music was always sort of synonymous with celebration and life.”
Zamora grew up and Texas and Mexico with a good public school music education, she said, “but I always dreamed of coming here to New York and, you know, pursuing dreams of opera. And so I was lucky enough to go to Juilliard and to have a fantastic career in opera,” said Zamora, who has collaborated with musicians including Sting and Yo Yo Ma. “I’ve sung all over the world in a very traditional kind of opera, but for me, Latin was almost the music that I did for myself in my dressing room, kind of as a touchstone.”
She was encouraged by one of the country’s leading pops concert producers to showcase her own heritage and bring “Hispanic music and Latin music into the symphonic palette.”
“It develops new audiences but also brings this music that has this dance vibe and all this vibrance into the concert hall,” Zamora said.
“The wonderful thing about ‘Tango Caliente,’ as the name implies, it has that dance rhythm throughout the whole concert. So, you obviously have some beautiful international dance superstars who join us for the concert, but all of the music — big orchestral pieces have this dance rhythm that really just sets the orchestra on fire in the best way.”
Zamora, who recently brought “Tango Caliente” to the Oklahoma City symphony, said the response has been gratifying throughout the country.
“What I love is that for people like myself, who grew up in Latin culture, this music is a touchstone, and I think it’s really nostalgic. So one of the things very touching for me is I look into audiences, I see people wiping their eyes because this is music that is part of their world from childhood,” she said. “But what’s so cool about partnering with symphonies is you’re also bringing in people who maybe have never heard Hispanic or Latin classical music. We do some amazing pieces that are from this genre called Sarzuela, a Spanish opera, but it always has these Latin, driving rhythms.
“A big through line and kind of theme of the concert is this idea of rhythm,” Zamora continued. “It’s like this constant heartbeat that underpins everything we do, and we say to people, ‘if you want to dance in the aisles, you certainly can.’ ”
Storhoff said the concert would be preceded by demonstrations of some of the tango moves in the lobby of Century II prior to the performance.
“It’s something that is flashy, so they’re sort of the showman version of real stage tango, essentially what you’ll see on ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and stuff like that. And then there’s the more amateur tango that people do at dance halls and that type of thing.”
‘TANGO CALIENTE’ BY WICHITA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14
Where: Century II concert hall, 225 W. Douglas
Tickets: $29-$85, from wichitasymphony.org, 316-267-7658 or the Century II box office
Rescheduled: “Voyage to Vienna,” the Jan. 24 concert postponed by the weather, will be performed at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 13 at Century II