José Luis Gómez with the Tenerife Symphony at the La Orotava Festival
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.
