Pacho Flores ends his artistic residence with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra with a concert that will take place next Saturday, July 8 at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, again under the baton its principal conductor, Domingo Hindoyan. This concert will host the British premiere of Altar de Bronce, a trumpet concerto by Gabriela Ortiz. This piece is the latest in the project of shared commissions for new trumpet concertos to prominent composers such as Arturo Márquez, Roberto Sierra, Paquito D’Rivera, Daniel Freiberg, Efraín Oscher, Christian Lindberg and Ortiz herself.
This will be the second premiere of the cycle, after the Spanish premiere last April by the Galician Symphony Orchestra under Manuel Hernández-Silva, in whose season Pacho was also artist-in-residence. The next premieres will take place in Mexico this summer, with the Orquesta de Minería and Carlos Miguel Prieto, and throughout the 2023/24 season in the US, with the New World Symphony and Prieto, and the San Diego Symphony under Rafael Payare. The program of this concert also includes Roberto Sierra’s Salseando, in whose shared commission the British orchestra also participated. This piece was premiered by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in January 2020, together with the orchestras of Murcia and Bordeaux, in both cases conducted by Hernández-Silva, and the orchestra of São Paulo led by Prieto.
Ortiz closes for now this project of commissions that has resulted in seven new concerts for the solo trumpet and orchestra repertoire. These pieces are being incorporated into Pacho’s discography on Deutsche Grammophon, such as his most recent album, Estirpe, which was released in the summer of 2022 and contains Concierto de Otoño, by Arturo Márquez, and Concerto Venezolano, by Paquito D’Rivera, together with Crónicas Latinoamericanas by Daniel Freiberg and Efraín Oscher’s Concierto Mestizo, which aren’t part of this project but were also written for Pacho.
Manuel Hernández-Silva returns to Argentina to conduct the Buenos Aires Philharmonic at the Teatro Colón for the second time this season. If last March he assumed the responsibility of conducting the opening concert of the season with a monograph on Brahms, on this 8th subscription concert, which will take place on Saturday, July 1, he will conduct Diario VI, by Gerardo Gandini, one of the most important Argentine composers of the 20th century, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola —with Xavier Inchausti, violin, and Pablo Saraví, viola, as soloists—, and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7. His stay in Argentina will be extended for a week to offer a concert with the orchestra in the city of Rosario.
In recent seasons, Manuel Hernández-Silva’s relationship with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic has strengthened considerably. Around these dates in 2019 he conducted, in his debut with the orchestra, two consecutive subscription programs, and he returned again in July 2022. Dvořák’s 8th Symphony, Schumann’s 2nd, Schubert’s 6th or Brahms’s 1st are some of the great symphonies that were part of his programs with the Philharmonic, along with concerts such as Saint Saëns’s Piano concerto No. 2, Beethoven’s Violin concerto No. 2 or Brahms’s Violin concerto, with soloists such as Martina Filjak, Arta Arnicane or Sergei Dogadin. Beethoven, Ravel and Berlioz are other composers whose works he conducted at the Colón, along with a world premiere by the Argentine composer Claudia Montero.
Upcoming engagements include the Praga Philharmonia at the Český Krumlov International Festival in the Czech Republic, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the NFM Wroclaw in Poland, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra or his return to the Norwegian Arctic Philharmonic. In Spain he is expected again in the orchestras of Córdoba, Ciudad de Granada and the Symphony Orchestra of the Region of Murcia.
Pacho Flores returns to the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, again with its principal conductor, Rafael Payare, to perform at the Rady Shell, the impressive new open-air auditorium in Jacobs Park. If his previous visit in February and March 2022 was for the US premiere of Concerto Venezolano by Paquito D’Rivera, in whose commission the orchestra had participated, this time it is to perform Salseando by Roberto Sierra. This piece was already premiered in the US just a few months ago by the Tucson Symphony Orchestra led by Hernández-Silva. A third visit to San Diego is already scheduled for February 2024 in which Pacho, again with Payare at the podium, will perform in the final premiere of Altar de Bronce by Gabriela Ortiz. In other words, in two years the San Diego Symphony will have scheduled three visits by Pacho Flores, two within the subscription concert season and another one in its summer cycle at the Rady Shell, including three of the new trumpet concertos that are part of the project of shared commissions for new trumpet concerts promoted by Pacho and his agency ACM Concerts. The orchestra has participated in the commission of two of these pieces.
This won’t be Pacho’s only visit to California this summer. In July, after returning from Liverpool, where he will offer the British premiere of Altar de Bronce with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Domingo Hindoyan, Pacho will debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel at the Hollywood Bowl performing Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de otoño. He will still return to North America once more before the end of summer, this time to Mexico, to take part in the American premiere of Altar de Bronce with the Minería Symphony Orchestra and Carlos Miguel Prieto. This piece will later be performed by the New World Symphony, also led by Prieto, before landing in San Diego for the closing of the premiere cycle.
Meanwhile, Pacho is also deepening his facet as a composer and is about to finish a new clarinet concert commissioned by the Galicia Symphony Orchestra, the Extremadura Symphony Orchestra and the Murcia Region Symphony Orchestra. The piece will be premiered by Juan Ferrero under the baton of Christian Vasquez (Galicia and Murcia) and Andrés Salado (Extremadura) throughout the 2023/24 season.
Marina Heredia takes part next June 28 and 29 in the world premiere of En Libertad! El camino de los gitanos, for singer, percussion, flamenco guitar and orchestra. The piece was commissioned by the Duisburger Philharmoniker to José Quevedo ‘Bolita’ and Joan Albert Amargós as part of the artistic residency of the cantaora in the 2022/23 season of the orchestra, and the texts were written by Quevedo himself on an idea by Marina Heredia. Both Quevedo and Amargós will have an active participation in this premiere since the former, as Marina’s regular guitarist, will also perform as a soloist, along with Paquito González on the percussion; Amargós on his part will act as musical director.
Marina had already visited Duisburg in November 2022 as part of her artistic residence, offering two concerts with the orchestra and its principal conductor, Axel Kober, in which she sang El Amor Brujo by Manuel de Falla. This visit was closed with the show Garnata by Marina’s usual quintet, since the interest of the artistic direction goes beyond symphonic concerts and they have also programmed Marina Heredia’s flamenco company. In the same way, after this world premiere, Marina and her company, with the addition of several Duisburger musicians, will offer a concert with the repertoire of Marina’s latest album, Capricho. In addition, educational activities have also been programmed in schools, as well as conferences-concerts in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes.
After the recent presentation of the 2023/24 season of the Galician Symphony Orchestra, we can also announce that the Spanish premiere of En Libertad will take place in May 2024 with the same soloists, this time conducted by José Trigueros. Marina is definitely the most demanded singer internationally for this repertoire; only last year she could be seen in Germany at the Konzerthaus, the Philharmonie and the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin; the Laieszhalle of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, or the Lausitz Festival in Görlitz, and she has sung with important orchestras such as Chicago Symphony or San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille or Orquestra Sinfônica da Casa da Música do Porto in Portugal.
Aarón Zapico opens the 72nd edition of the Granada International Music and Dance Festival at the Palace of Carlos V on Wednesday 21 and Thursday 22 June with a program on the figure of Don Quixote. The core piece will be Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro, in commemoration of the centenary of its premiere on June 25, 1923 at the palace of the Princess of Polignac in Paris, almost exactly 100 years ago. Aarón will lead the Ciudad de Granada Orchestra with Alicia Amo, soprano (Trujamán), David Alegret, tenor (Maese Pedro), José Antonio López, baritone (Don Quixote), Juan Carlos Garvayo, harpsichord, and the Compañía Etcétera, with Enrique Lanz as stage director and responsible for the puppets, set design and projections. The program, entitled El retablo de Maese Pedro. Un tríptico sobre Don Quijote, also includes Burlesque de Quichotte, overture-suite in G major, TWV 55:G1 (1716) by Georg Philipp Telemann, and a selection from Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, op. 97 (1743) by Joseph Bodin Boismortier.
As the festival explains, Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de Maese Pedro, one of the most unique and important stage works in the history of Spanish music, was premiered at the palace of the Princess of Polignac in Paris on June 25, 1923. Conceived as a brief chamber opera for puppets on an episode of Don Quixote, the work had already been heard in concert version in March of that same year at the Teatro San Fernando in Seville. For the Parisian premiere, Falla had the collaboration of professor, engraver and set designer Hermenegildo Lanz. In 2009, his grandson Enrique Lanz, director of the prestigious Compañía Etcétera, created giant puppets to present the play at the Teatro Real, and it is these puppets that will now arrive on the stage of the Alhambra, together with the OCG, Aarón Zapico, a group of select Spanish singers and a couple of Cervantine works from the Baroque period to complete the programme.
Aarón has just returned from Mexico after conducting the Academia de Música Antigua of the Universidad Autónoma de México in three concerts in various venues of the Mexican capital. The program was made up exclusively of works by Spanish Baroque composers such as José Castel, Francisco Hernández Illana, Vicente Baset, Antonio Literes, Mateo Flecha, José de Nebra, Sebastián Durón or Juan de Navas, grouped under the generic title of Fuego: an imaginary zarzuela of the Hispanic Baroque. Among Aarón’s upcoming commitments are his debuts at the Teatro Real in Madrid to conduct La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola di Alcina by Francesca Caccini, and at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, where he will conduct Antonio Literes’s Los Elementos. He will also lead orchestras such as the Real Filharmonía de Galicia, the Cordoba Orchestra or the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra. Aarón Zapico is a frequent guest at the Granada Festival. He made his debut in 2011 with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which were recorded on an album produced by Winter & Winter. In 2019, Forma Antiqva, the group directed by Zapico, was resident ensemble of the festival. He has also been a teacher in the Manuel de Falla Courses. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, he returned as a teacher and head of the Festival’s Baroque Academy.
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