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<\/a><\/div>\n\u201cHistory is not a line forward,\u201d said violinist Liz Loayza Herrera, a native of Bolivia and a lead participant in \u201cLa Diosa\u201d (\u201cThe Goddess\u201d). \u201cIt is not a dead archive. We are woven together in so many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Debra Nagy, the oboe-playing founder of Les Delices (pronounced \u201cLay Day-Lease\u201d), a Cleveland-based Baroque chamber music group, has a penchant for thematic programming, for putting together concerts that bear out a certain concept, style, or message.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the case of \u201cLa Diosa,\u201d however, part of the group\u2019s ongoing, multi-year \u201cMythology Project,\u201d Nagy started with a person. Eager to truly connect with her Hispanic neighbors, she began by tapping Estel\u00ed Gomez, an acclaimed soprano of Mexican heritage, who she said would help her design a program in an authentic manner.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat felt important to me, to not impose an idea,\u201d Nagy said. \u201cI wanted this to be a collaborative creation, for others to bring something of themselves to the table.\u201d<\/p>\n
That they did, in spades. With the help of Gomez, Herrera and others, the group researched, amassed and prepared a truly vibrant collection of music conceived for the cathedrals, missions, and courts of modern-day Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala. The pieces they found call for combinations of two violins, viola, cello, recorder, harpsichord, guitar and percussion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The idea is to illustrate how freely music moved across oceans. European missionaries to Central America brought their music with them, as did people of African descent. Likewise, when those people and others left that region, they exported Indigenous traditions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI love to think about this [colonial Latin America] as a place of encounter,\u201d said Herrera, a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University. \u201cWhen these two continents got together, they formed the beginning of this music, and they passed it on through generations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Indeed, they continued passing it on for centuries, right up to the present day. Hence the presence on \u201cLa Diosa\u201d of a new<\/em> piece \u2013 an unusual offering from a group that specializes in very old music.\u00a0<\/p>\nTo make that connection between older traditions and the music of today, Nagy imported another talent: Gilda Lyons, a Nicaraguan-American composer and vocalist whose music often straddles boundaries of time, geography, and style.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lyons penned the work that became the program\u2019s title, \u201cSoy La Diosa\u201d (\u201cI am the Goddess\u201d), a four-movement, bilingual piece for soprano and chamber ensemble invoking the female Mayan deity Ix Chel and celebrating the divine feminine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful, mystical piece,\u201d Nagy said, noting that between Gomez, Lyons and probably the Mayan deity herself, \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot in common. They\u2019re kind of kindred personalities.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Les Delices plans to present \u201cLa Diosa\u201d (the program) twice in full. Performances will take place at 4 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28 at The Heights Theater in Cleveland Heights and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 1 at the Pivot Center for Art, Dance, and Expression in Cleveland. Tickets are available at the group\u2019s website, lesdelices.org.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those aren\u2019t the only ways to experience \u201cLa Diosa,\u201d however. Importantly, in a special effort to reach the Hispanic community, Les Delices will also present a free preview at Cleveland\u2019s CentroVilla25. That program, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, will feature a conversation with Lyons as well as performances of music from colonial Bolivia by specially coached students at Bard High School Early College.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Separately, Herrera is also leading a workshop for high-school string players called \u201cBolivian Baroque\u201d at The Music Settlement in Cleveland and a choral program at Firestone Community Learning Center in Akron, which will culminate in a side-by-side performance March 14 with Les Delices at House Three Thirty, also in Akron.<\/p>\n
Les Delices is no stranger to such outreach. The group maintains strong relationships with schools all over Northeast Ohio and routinely tailors its educational programs to fit whatever the musicians happen to be exploring at that time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the number and nature of the offerings around \u201cLa Diosa\u201d is special. That\u2019s because there\u2019s something special about \u201cLa Diosa.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
What\u2019s true for the students being trained around the program is surely true for everybody else, and especially for those from Cleveland\u2019s Hispanic community: This is a concert not to be missed if you\u2019re interested in how the music of Latin America fits into the broader history of music.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful narrative to dig into,\u201d Herrera said. \u201cIt\u2019s not just a concert to listen to\u2026They\u2019re deeply immersed. They\u2019re literally cherishing it. It\u2019s about giving people the opportunity to understand how these stories evolved.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source thelandcle.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Les Delices performing at Heights Theater in 2025. [Photo courtesy of Les Delices] Classical music is for everyone, but an upcoming program by Les Delices is for one particular demographic a little more than most: Cleveland\u2019s Hispanic community. With \u201cLa Diosa,\u201d which runs Feb. 26-March 1, Les Delices is veering boldly from its comfort zone, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2296558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[445038,402565,445039,445040,445041,22219,347504,25540,445042,445043,445044,445045,445046,426094,404814,445047,445048,445049,445050,445051],"class_list":["post-2296557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-bard-high-school-early-college","tag-bolivia","tag-bolivian-baroque","tag-case-western-reserve-university","tag-centrovilla25","tag-classical-music","tag-cleveland","tag-gomez","tag-guatemala","tag-heights-theater","tag-herrera","tag-les-delices","tag-lyons","tag-nagy","tag-peru","tag-pivot-center","tag-the-land","tag-the-land-cle","tag-the-music-settlement","tag-zach-lewis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Les-Delices-brings-classical-music-to-new-communities-in-Cleveland.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2296557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2296559,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296557\/revisions\/2296559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2296558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2296557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2296557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2296557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}