Perry So returns in the middle of the season to the podium of the Navarra Symphony, where he is Music and Artistic Director, to face a double program that he will offer in the usual subscription series at the Baluarte Auditorium in Pamplona on Thursday, February 29, and in the Auditorium of the Palacio Euskalduna in Bilbao, within the program of the Musika/Música Festival, on Sunday, March 3. In both programs the Swedish soprano Camila Tilling acts as soloist, in the first, which is titled The Voice of the Earth, she will provide her voice to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, which will be preceded by the absolute premiere of the work Climate Change, by Vicent Egea, commissioned by the Baluarte Foundation; in the second, as the protagonist of Francis Poulenc’s Stabat Mater, preceded by Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 6.
Perry So began his journey as Music and Artistic Director of the Navarra Symphony in the 2022/23 season, and starting next season he will combine with his new responsibility as Music Director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, the city that hosts the University from Yale, one of the most prestigious in the world and where Perry earned a degree in Comparative Literature.
Perry So has worked with the orchestras of Cleveland and Minnesota, the symphonies of Houston, Detroit, New Jersey, Nürenberg, Israel and Shanghai, the Chinese Philharmonic, Residentie Orkest of The Hague and the Szezecin and Zagreb philharmonics. He has been a frequent guest at Walt Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl as a Dudamel Conducting Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He led the Hong Kong Philharmonic with Lang Lang in celebrating the 15th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China at the close of his four-year term as Associate Conductor. In Spain he has conducted the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra, Malaga Philharmonic, Navarra Symphony, Murcia Region Symphony and Asturias Symphony.
He received First Prize and Special Prize at the 5th International Prokofiev Conducting Competition in St. Petersburg. He has recorded extensively with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Concert Orchestra. His recording of the Barber and Korngold violin concertos with Alexander Gilman and the Cape Town Philharmonic was awarded the Diapason D’Or in 2012. Known for the enormous range of repertoire he conducts, including numerous world premieres on four continents, he has conducted productions of Cosí fan tutte, The Magic Flute, The Turn of the Screw, Giulio Cesare, Gianni Schicchi, Eugene Oneguin or Die Fledermaus. He has been an assistant to Edo de Waart, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel, Lorin Maazel and John Adams.
Abraham Cupeiro presents his third album, MYTHOS, recorded for Loira Records at the Abbey Road Studios with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Dimas Ruiz. This album follows Os Sons Esquecidos (The Forgotten Sounds, 2017), with the Real Filharmonía de Galicia, and Pangea (2020), also recorded with the Royal Philharmonic. Both were released by Warner Classics, and always with Dimas Ruiz as conductor.
Builder and multi-instrumentalist, Abraham Cupeiro recovers instruments that have been lost in time, which he uses to create new sounds and interweave them in other musics. As a performer, he stands out as one of the few people who plays the Karnyx (Celtic Iron Age trumpet). He is also the promoter of an ancestral instrument in the Galician tradition: the “corna”, an instrument that his grandfather played and that appears in the illuminations of Alfonso X, king of Castille.
Mythos
Amazonian mythology, ancient Chinese dragons, Nordic giants, gods and goddesses of Antiquity, sacred animals and Mother Nature. Arab, Celtic, Roman or Greek mythologies are the starting points from which Abraham Cupeiro takes the audience of MYTHOS to worlds and cities lost in time, such as the enigmatic Atlantis. Recovering the instruments that our ancestors played in Greek theaters, Roman circuses or caves lost at the ends of the world, he offers us a musical journey through stories created since time immemorial to find a logic to the origin of the universe. Abraham Cupeiro and his ancestral instruments will open the doors of the past for us and guide us on a journey through past civilizations to the moment when human beings first looked up to infinity. In MYTHOS we will discover, among other wonders, the sounds of the Aulos, one of the most represented instruments in Greek antiquity whose invention is attributed to the Goddess Athena, or those of the Cornu, rescued from the ashes of Pompeii. MYTHOS is being presented these days on a Galician tour with the Gaos Orchestra, with performances in Ferrol, Lugo and Santiago.
Abraham’s interest in organology has led him to obtain a collection of more than 200 instruments from all over the world and from different periods, that he shows through a concert-monologue under the name Resonando en el Pasado (Resounding in the past). Abraham recovers and builds various instruments, and performs with them today’s music, as well as mixes them with modern ensembles.
Christian Vásquez and Marina Heredia join the Philharmonic of the Republic of North Macedonia to offer a Spanish and Latin American program that includes four of the Canciones españolas antiguas compiled and harmonized by Federico García Lorca, in an original orchestration by José Trigueros (Anda, jaleo; Las morillas de Jaén; Cuatro Muleros and Sevillanas del siglo XVIII), El Amor Brujo and El Sombrero de Tres Picos, Suite nº 2, by Manuel de Falla, along with the suite from the ballet Estancia, by Alberto Ginastera. The concert will take place next Thursday, February 15, at the Skopje Philharmonic Hall.
Lorca’s songs in their present orchestration were premiered in December 2021 by Marina Heredia herself, together with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia and José Trigueros at the baton, at the Ciudad de la Cultura in Santiago de Compostela. This performance under conductor Christian Vásquez will be the first outside of Spain. This coming April, again with Trigueros at the baton and together with the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla, Marina will again perform these songs at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville.
This is the first time that Christian Vásquez and Marina Heredia will coincide for a symphonic project, although both of them have long careers with orchestras around the world. Last season, Marina Heredia, together with flamenco guitarist José Quevedo ‘Bolita’ and percussionist Paquito González as co-soloists, premiered a new work at the Mercatorhalle in Duisburg that adds to the symphonic repertoire for flamenco singer and symphony orchestra: In Freedom. The Journey of the Gipsies, a work composed by Quevedo himself together with Joan Albert Amargós, who also conducted the Duisburger Philharmoniker.
