Tijuana to Milan: Music without borders

About 1,100 students from nearly every corner of Tijuana are preparing for a world premiere in Milan, Italy, next week. But they won’t be leaving the city.

The chorus of 900 singers and an orchestra of 200 at the Tijuana Cultural Center will be linked through live-streaming video with 85 musicians in Italy for a performance on Thursday at the Milan Expo. The occasion is World Food Day, and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is expected to attend.

“Tijuana has stolen the show” with its large and enthusiastic participation, said Francesco Grigolo, an Italian musician who is directing the effort and wrote the five-minute piece they will be performing at the event, “Nuestro Canto Es De Agua” — “We Sing of Water.”

The concert has required months of preparation. It will highlight close to five years of efforts to bring music to children in some of Tijuana’s toughest neighborhoods. The great majority of the participants in Thursday’s concert are beginners, many of them Tijuana elementary school students but also with contingents from Mexicali, Tecate and Ensenada.

Close to 500 of the students have been drawn from the Redes 2025 program of the Centro de Artes Musicales, an effort involving more than 2,000 at-risk students and 42 musical groups in Tijuana, Ensenada and Mexicali. About 400 other participants are enrolled in Coros Mi Festival en tu Comunidad, which encompasses 24 choruses at schools in impoverished Tijuana communities. Other participants include members of the Tijuana Opera Children’s Chorus, the Tijuana Youth Symphony, the Red Rio Nuevo Chorus from the Baja California Institute of Culture in Mexicali and a group from the State Arts Center in Tecate.

“I think this is a grand opportunity to open their world,” said Alida Guajardo de Cervantes, president of Promotora Bellas Artes, the group behind Coros Mi Festival en tu Comunidad. “We’re giving them an opportunity to be seen, to participate. We’re giving them tools so they can express themselves through art.”

How this uncommon effort came about has its own unusual story.

It started in Iguazú, Argentina, with Tonatiuh Guillén López, president of Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a think tank in Tijuana. While attending a performance featuring students from Argentina and neighboring Paraguay, he met Grigolo, who heads Fronteras Musicales Abiertas, an Italian organization working with those students.

At the Colegio’s invitation, Grigolo came to Tijuana last year and visited city’s music education programs. He learned about the Redes 2025 program.

In a telephone interview from Milan on Friday, Grigolo said he was impressed that Redes 2025 had worked to meet the needs of Tijuana students with a repertoire they could relate to.

“You could see that many musician were thinking of what would be best for Tijuana and its people,” he said.

This week’s concert is a first for Tijuana and marks unprecedented collaboration by the different arts organizations in the region, said María Teresa Riqué, director of the Tijuana Opera.

At their first joint rehearsal on Thursday, students filled the red chairs of the theatre of the Tijuana Cultural Center, while the orchestra members crowded the stage, their eyes on conductor Emiliano López Guadarrama and choral director Dzaya Castillo.

“They are very excited, you can feel it,” said Carolina Orozco, a mezzo soprano who leads six small school choruses, many of whose members are participating in the event. “This gives them a chance to know that they can do other things, that the arts offer a path.”

Among the perfomers were 28 singers from Justo Sierra Elementary School in Colonia Libertad. Sixth-grader Hania López said she hopes that people in Italy will hear the message: “That Tijuana is very talented,” she said, “and sings very well.”

sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1716 Twitter: @sandradibble