Perry So opens the 2023/2024 season of the Navarre Symphony Orchestra, his second season as Principal Conductor of the Spanish ensemble. The concerts will take place at 7.30 p.m. on October 5 and 6 at the Auditorio Baluarte in Pamplona and the Centro Cultural de Tafalla, respectively, with a program that includes Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, with the virtuoso Nikolay Lugansky, and Shubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944 “The Great”. Perry will lead the Navarre Symphony Orchestra in five other subscription programs of a season that will also feature conductors such as Emilia Hoving, Tomas Dausgaard, Pablo González, Jaume Santonja, Delyana Lazarova and Catherine Larsen-Maguire.
Perry So, conductor
Music and Artistic Director of the Navarra Symphony Orchestra Music Director Designated of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra
A dynamic and transformative presence in concert halls on five continents, Perry So is currently Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra (Navarre Symphony Orchestra), and Music Director Designate of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra beginning July 2024. Under his leadership, the Navarre Symphony Orchestra has toured to critical acclaim, widely lauded for the “artistic vitality” of its programming, and the ensemble recognized as currently being at “one of the finest points in its history.”
Perry So was born in Hong Kong and received his early training in piano, organ, violin, viola and composition there. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in literature with a focus on the interaction of literature and music in Central Europe in the modernist era; as a student at Yale he founded an orchestra and led the undergraduate opera company. He received his training as a conductor initially under James Sinclair, then under Gustav Meier at the Peabody Institute. In 2008 he received First and Special Prizes at the Prokofiev Conducting Competition in St Petersburg, Russia. He has since served as Associate Conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Conducting Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Artistic Collaborator of the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias and on the conducting faculty at the Manhattan School of Music.
In recent seasons Perry So made his subscription series debut with the San Francisco Symphony and his European operatic debut at the Royal Danish Opera in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Other highlights include a tour to Milan with the Nuremberg Symphony and a seven-week tour of South Africa with three orchestras including Verdi’s Requiem in Cape Town. He has appeared with the Cleveland and Minnesota Orchestras, the symphony orchestras of Israel, New Zealand, Shanghai, Houston, Detroit, New Jersey, Tucson, Tenerife and Málaga; the London, China, Seoul and Szezcin Philharmonics; the Residentie Orkest in the Hague and the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie in Koblenz, among others. He toured the Balkan Peninsula at the helm of the Zagreb Philharmonic in the first series of cultural exchanges established after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
His work in the recording studio encompasses a broad sampling of twentieth century British, French and Russian music with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Concert Orchestra, and his album of Barber and Korngold’s violin concertos with soloist Alexander Gilman and the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra was awarded the Diapason d’Or.
His wide-ranging musical interests encompass world premieres on four continents as well as championing the reintroduction of the Renaissance and Baroque repertory into symphonic programs. His work with young musicians has taken him to the the Round Top Festival, where he serves on the board of trustees, the Australian Youth Orchestra, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, the Manhattan School of Music, the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts and the Yale School of Music.
Pacho Flores’ latest album for Deutsche Grammophon, ESTIRPE (2022), with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería and conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto has been nominated to the Latin Grammy Awards 2023 in three categories: Best Classical Album; Best Classical Contemporary Composition (Concerto Venezolano by Paquito D’Rivera) and Best Arrangement (Crónicas Latinoamericanas by Daniel Freiberg). In addition to the nominated works by Freiberg and D’Rivera, ESTIRPE also includes compositions by Arturo Márquez, Efraín Oscher and Pacho Flores himself.
Recorded between 3rd and 6th September 2019 at Churubusco Studios in México City with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería and producer Ingo Petri, ESTIRPE includes four new concertos for trumpet and orchestra written for Pacho and the wide collection of trumpets, cornets and flugelhorns expressly manufactured for him by STOMVI. For this recording, Pacho used at least a dozen different instruments. The concertos included in ESTIRPE are Concierto de Otoño by Arturo Márquez, Concerto Venezolano by Paquito D’Rivera, Crónicas Latinoamericanas by Daniel Freiberg, and Efraín Oscher’s Concierto Mestizo, as well as Morocota, a short piece by Pacho himself.
Crónicas Latinoamericanas competes as an arrangement since it was originally written for Paquito D’Rivera’s clarinet under the commission of the West Deutsche Rundfunk of Cologne, which Freiberg adapted for trumpet; Concerto Venezolano and Concierto de Otoño are the result of the project of shared commissions for new trumpet concerts that Pacho himself has been promoting; and Mestizo was commissioned by the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar in 2010. Mestizo was the first big concerto for trumpet and orchestra specially written for several instruments of the trumpet family, so that it can be considered the origin of all those new concerts that these composers, along with others such as Roberto Sierra, Christian Lindberg, Gabriela Ortiz, Igmar Alderete, Tuomas Turriago and a new one by Daniel Freiberg as well, have since written for Pacho and his arsenal of instruments in the last years.
This week Pacho Flores makes his debut with the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra under Carlos Miguel Prieto, accompanied by Héctor Molina, interpreter of cuatro venezolano. The program consists of Haydn’s trumpet concerto and the Concerto Venezolano by Paquito D’Rivera. Concerts will take place at the Meymandi Concert Hall in Raleigh on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 September at 20:00 hour
Manuel Hernández-Silva returns to the Český Krumlov Festival in the Czech Republic to lead the Prague Philharmonia in a Spanish program that includes orchestral music, a guitar concert and zarzuela numbers. He will be accompanied on this occassion by other great Spanish artists such as the guitarist Rafael Aguirre, the soprano Beatriz Díaz and the tenor Pablo García López. The program will begin with Musas y Resuello, by Pacho Flores, which will premiere in the Czech Republic; the Concierto de Aranjuez, by Joaquín Rodrigo, and will feature in the second part a selection of romances, duets and orchestral numbers from zarzuelas by Soutullo, Moreno Torroba, Moreno Buendía, Chapí, Barrera, Giménez and Fernández Caballero. The concert will take place at the Pivovarská Zahrada next Saturday, July 22 at 8:30 p.m.
Hernández-Silva already conducted a similar program last season together with the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, obtaining an overwhelming success in the three concerts they offered of this project, which was video-recorded. On that occasion he was also accompanied by Díaz and Aguirre, while the tenor roles were sung by the Colombian tenor César Gutiérrez. With this concert in the Czech Republic, Hernández-Silva closes a great season that began at the Festival de Música Sacra de Bogotá with the monumental Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Górecki, and continued in Cyprus with Pacho Flores before returning to Spain, where he conducted the Valencia orchestra in a subscription concert at the Iturbi Piano Award, and the Orchestra of the Escuela Superior de Música del País Vasco (Musikene).
Javier Perianes and Hernández-Silva at the Ceski Krumlov Festival in 2017. Photo: Libor Sváček
He then traveled to the US to conduct again the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, beginning an intense period that also took him to France to lead the Orchestra National des Pays de la Loire and then to Norway for a fruitful debut with the Arctic Philharmonic that earned him a new invitation for the 2025/26 season. Afterwards, he returned to America to conduct the opening concert of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra season before facing a double invitation with the Galician Symphony, where he also had the opportunity to conduct its young orchestra. He would yet return to Latin America on two other occassions to conduct a subscription concert of the National Symphony of Colombia and to attend a second invitation in the season of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. Next season, Hernández-Silva will have a greater presence in Spain with returns to orchestras such as Granada, Córdoba or Murcia, while abroad he is expected in Poland, Sweden, Argentina or Singapore.
Pacho Flores makes his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and Gustavo Dudamel on July 18 at the Hollywood Bowl, where he will perform Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño. The Márquez’s Concerto is part of a program that includes the premiere of La Serpiente de Colores, by Cortés-Álvarez, commissioned by the orchestra, and Estancia, de Ginastera in its complete ballet version. Pacho, who has just closed his residency with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, with which he offered the British premiere of Altar de Bronce by Gabriela Ortiz, thus puts the finishing touch to a season that has taken him to Mexico, Singapore, Cyprus, Germany, Venezuela, Great Britain, Serbia, Norway, Spain, Colombia, and twice to Canada —Quebec and Montreal—, as well as several times to the US, including his debut with the San Francisco Symphony, his returns to Tucson and San Diego, where he is a frequent guest, and new visits to Dartmouth College or the Walla Walla Symphony Orchestra.
This season, he has also closed the premiere cycle of Historias de Flores y Tangos by Daniel Freiberg and began the one for Altar de Bronce by Gabriela Ortiz with the Galicia Symphony conducted by Hernández-Silva. Pacho has also released his latest recording, ESTIRPE, with Deutsche Grammophon. Dudamel closes a list of conductors with whom Pacho has worked this season and which includes Manuel Hernández-Silva, José Luis Gómez, Christian Vásquez, Domingo Hindoyan, Rafael Payare, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Felix Mildenberger, Anu Tali and Alondra de la Parra.
Next season, which will again begin in Mexico, will see Pacho’s debut with new US orchestras such as the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony or the New World Symphony, as well as his return to San Diego to close the cycle of premieres of Gabriela Ortiz and to Ohio for the premiere of Christian Lindberg’s Magical Horses. He will also appear at the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico and the Bravo Veil! Festival in Colorado, and will perform in Sweden, Germany, Poland, Finland and again Singapore and Norway, as well as in many Spanish orchestras such as the Orquesta Ciudad de Granada and the Orquesta Simfónica del Vallès, with which he will make his debut, the Filarmónica de Gran Canaria, the Orquesta Sinfónica de la Region of Murcia or the Orquesta de Córdoba.The 23/24 season will also see the premiere of Pacho’s clarinet concerto, written for Juan Ferrer and commissioned by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, the Orquesta de Extremadura and the Orquesta Sinfónica de la Region of Murcia.
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.
