Pacho Flores will be artist-in-residence of La Virée Classique (The Classical Spree) 2022, the summer festival organized by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra during the month of August. The broad presence provided by his status as artist-in-residence, with three different programs as a soloist, will allow him to also show himself as a conductor and composer, two facets that have become increasingly important in the development of his career. On August 10, on the Esplanade of the Olympic Park with the Montreal Symphony conducted by Rafael Payare, Pacho Flores will perform the Concerto Venezolano, by Paquito D’Rivera, a concerto commissioned and premiered by the Minería Symphony Orchestra (Prieto), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Hindoyan), Valencia Orchestra (Hernández-Silva) and San Diego Symphony (Payare).
On August 13, at the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe, Pacho will play and conduct a brass and percussion ensemble with a program featuring works by Copland and Joan Tower, originals for that group, as well as Musas y Resuello, by Pacho himself, along with others by Gershwin, Sarasate, PIazzolla and another of Pacho’s works, Labios Vermelhos, arranged for this format also by Pacho Flores himself. In this concert he will have the participation as a guest soloist of Paul Merkelo, OFM’s principal trumpeter. And finally on August 14, again at the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe and under the baton of Rafael Payare conducting the Ensemble de la Virée (Ensemble made up of 15 string instrumentalists: winners of the OSM Competition, CMIM, members of the OSM and the Obiora ensemble and guest soloists), Pacho will play Piazzolla’s Revirado and his own work Cantos y Revueltas, for trumpet, Venezuelan cuatro and strings. Therefore, three concerts as a soloist, one of them also as conductor and three works of his authorship plus the arrangements of another three is the balance of his presence as resident artist in the 2022 edition of this Virée Classique.
He will then travel to Mexico for the American premiere, together with the Minería Symphony and Carlos Miguel Prieto, of Historias de Flores y Tangos, by Daniel Freiberg, co-commissioned by Minería itself, the Oviedo Filarmonía (Macías), Arctic Philharmonic (Hernández-Silva) and Walla Walla Symphony (Bergman), and for the presentation of his most recent recording on Deutsche Grammophon, ESTIRPE, recorded precisely with Minería and Prieto in August 2019 and which includes the Concierto de Otoño, by Arturo Márquez, Latin American Chronicles by Daniel Freiberg, Concerto Venezolano by D’Rivera, Mestizo by Efraín Oscher and a short piece by Pacho himself, the Venezuelan waltz, Morocota. This is Pacho’s fifth recording for Deutsche Grammophon after Cantar, Entropía, Fractales, and Cantos y Revueltas.
José Luis Gómez returns to the podium of the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra to conduct the orchestra in the XVII Villa de La Orotava Chamber Music Festival on July 8, 2022. On the program, Beethoven’s Overture of The Creatures of Prometheus and Symphony No. 7 and Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, for which he will feature Maximiano Martín as soloist. For José Luis Gomez it is always a pleasure to return to the Tenerife Symphony, an orchestra in which he was a member as a second violin soloist until, after training as an orchestra conductor, in 2010 he won the First Prize at the 5th International Conducting Competition Sir Georg Solti unanimously by the jury that launched his career as a director internationally.
Following the competition he was immediately appointed assistant conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, a position created especially for him by Paavo Järvi. José Luis Gómez was also Principal Conductor of the 1813 Teatro Sociale di Como Orchestra between 2012 and 2015 and in 2016 he was appointed Music Director of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, with which he recently renewed his contract through the 2023/24 season. Since he took command in Tucson, there has been a significant increase in the number of subscribers and patrons, he has introduced new outreach activities and deepened the orchestra’s existing educational projects, as well as promoted an expansion of the orchestra’s repertoire with special attention to Latin American composers, such as the commission for the new trumpet concerto by Arturo Márquez, whose US premiere took place in 2019 with Pacho Flores and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Gómez.
He has worked with European orchestras such as RTVE Symphony, Weimar Staatskapelle Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Gran Canaria Philharmonic Orchestra, Hamburg Symphony, Karlsruhe Staatstheater Orchester, Basel Sinfonietta, Orquestra Sinfônica do Porto, Castilla y Leon Symphony , Pomeriggi Musicali of Milan, Warsaw Symphony, SWR Radio Sinfonie-Orchester Stuttgart or Tenerife Symphony Orchestra; and Americans such as the Houston Symphony, the Ottawa National Arts Center Orchestra, the Vancouver Symphony, Colorado, Grand Rapids, Winnipeg, Alabama, Rochester, Louisiana, Pasadena, the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra and the National Orchestra of Peru. He recently conducted a tour of Belgium with the Flanders Symphony and Johannes Moser as soloist.
In the operatic arena, highlights include La Bohème at the Frankfurt Opera and a new production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the Stuttgart Opera, La Forza del Destino in Tokyo with the New National Theatre, Don Carlo and Norma at The State Opera in Tbilisi, Georgia, La Traviata in concert version with the Sacramento Philharmonic, or Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni at the Teatro Sociale di Como, where he also closed the season with a spectacular production of Cavalleria Rusticana. He has recorded Bela Fleck’s Concerto No. 2 for banjo and orchestra ‘Juno Concerto‘ with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and conducted the Hamburg Symphony and the talented young clarinettist Vladimir Soltan in the release of an album for MGD that collects the concertos for Nielson, Françaix and Debussy clarinet.
Manuel Hernández-Silva returns to the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires to lead once again the Philharmonic Orchestra with a program that includes Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43 and Concerto for piano and orchestra No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19, by Beethoven, and Symphony No. 6 in C major, D. 589 by Franz Schubert. The concert, the tenth of the subscription series, will take place on July 8, 2022 at 8:00 p.m. and will feature the Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane. Hernández-Silva made his debut at the Teatro Colón in June 2019 and his stay was extended for a week to replace another director who canceled his commitment, for which he directed two consecutive subscription programs. The excellent public and critical reception of his presentation at the Buenos Aires Coliseum resulted in a re-invitation for August 2021 that had to be canceled for reasons related to COVID-19 and that has finally been recovered.
Hernández-Silva has conducted orchestras such as the Wienner Symphoniker, WDR Rundfunkorchester, Rheinische Philharmonie, Orchester National Bordeaux-Aquitaine, São Paulo State Orchestra, Wuppertal Symphony, Israel Symphony, Prague Radio Symphony, Janacek Philharmonic, Nord Czech Philharmonic, Olomouc Philharmonic, Biel Symphony Orchestra, Mulhouse Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic, Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic, Hradec Králové Philharmonic, National Symphony of Mexico, Puerto Rico Symphony, Buenos Aires Philharmonic, National Symphony of Chile, Venezuela Symphony, Caracas Symphony or the Simón Bolívar Orchestra . In Spain, he has conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Galicia, the Valencia Orchestra, the Oviedo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Principality of Asturias Symphony Orchestra, the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, the Euskadi Symphony Orchestra, the Navarra Symphony Orchestra, the Barcelona and National Symphony Orchestras of Catalonia, the Symphony Orchestra del Vallés, Murcia Region Symphony Orchestra, Granada City Orchestra, Córdoba Orchestra, Málaga Philharmonic Orchestra, Extremadura Orchestra, Castilla y León Symphony Orchestra, RTVE Symphony Orchestra, Community of Madrid Orchestra, National Orchestra from Spain, the Gran Canaria Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra and the Balearic Islands Symphony Orchestra; and in important Festivals such as the Donostiarra Musical Fortnight, the Granada International Music and Dance Festival, the Úbeda Festival or the Cemski-Krumlov Festival in the Czech Republic.
As an opera director, he has received great reviews for his work on titles such as Die Zauberflöte, Cosí fan tutte or Don Giovanni, by Mozart, Fidelio, by Beethoven, and La Boheme, Gianni Schicchi, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, or more recently Manon Lescaut, of Puccini. Among his recent and upcoming commitments, important debuts with the Orchester National Bordeaux-Aquitaine, Orquestra do Estado de São Paulo, Tucson Symphony Orchestra, Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Sinfónica de Galicia, National des Pays de la Loire or the National Symphony of Cyprus stand out, as well as his returns to the Orquesta de Valencia or Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia.
