Christian Vásquez with the Medellin Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Vásquez with the Medellin Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Vásquez conducts the Medellin Philharmonic Orchestra next Saturday, September 4, at the Metropolitan Theater of this Colombian city. The program includes Mussorgsky’s Intermezzo in modo classico, Mozart’s Clarinet concerto with Felipe Jiménez, and Bizet’s Symphony in C. The concert is part of a four-week residence within the selection process for a principal conductor that the orchestra is currently carrying out. Throughout this month-long residence, Christian Vásquez will conduct four concerts of different character and varied programs.

The next concert will take place on Friday 10 September at the Parroquia de San Juan Apóstol in Medellin with ensembles from the various sections of the Medellin Philharmonic—strings, wood, brass and percussion—. Vásquez will conduct works by Donizetti, Gounod, Wagner, Copland, Jorge Humberto Pinzón or Pacho Flores.

Christian Vásquez Medellin Philharmonic

©Takafumi Ueno

The following week, on Friday, September 17, Christian will conduct a popular program at the Theater of the University of Medellin as part of the social and community activities of the Philharmonic, which will include some of the most popular soundtracks of the last years by composers such as John Williams, Henry Mancini, Hans Zimmer, Lalo Schifrin, Howard Shore, Monty Norman or Ramin Djawadi. Christian’s residence will finish on Sunday, September 26 with an educational concert that aims to take the audience on a journey from Spain to various Latin American countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and finally Colombia, through works by Ruperto Chapí, Gerónimo Giménez, Rafael Hernández, Pérez Prado, Miguel Matamoros, Alberto Nepomuceno, Antonio Estévez, Lucho Bermúdez or Miguel Ángel Martín.

Christian Vásquez is Music Director of the Teresa Carreño Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, which he led on an important tour around Europe that took them to perform in London, Lisbon, Toulouse, Munich, Stockholm and Istanbul. Vásquez has also been Principal Conductor of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, as well as Principal Guest Conductor of the Het Gelders Orkest in The Netherlands and the Gävle Symphony Orchestra in Sweden.


 

 

 

Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo, Crumb-Lorca Project in Granada

Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo, Crumb-Lorca Project in Granada

Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo will perform within the Crumb-Lorca Project at the Granada International Music and Dance Festival on its 70th anniversary edition. This series of three monographic concerts is the core of the Crumb-Lorca Project, in which groups such as the Bretón Quartet, NeoArs Sonora or United Instruments of Lucilin dedicate part of their programs to the works of this North American composer. It is a historic event because the 12 works that George Crumb composed over more than half a century under the inspiration of Federico García Lorca will be performed together for the first time by Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo in these concerts.

This is a production of ACM Concerts for the Granada Festival, supported by the Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical. Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo (TAC) consists of singers Carmen Gurriarán and Verónica Plata, sopranos, Susana Ferrero, mezzo, and Isidro Anaya, baritone; André Cebrián, flute; Eduardo Martínez, oboe; Kathleen Balfe, cello; Joaquín Arrabal, double bass; Alba Barreiro, harp; Pedro Mateo González, guitars and banjo; Fernando Bustamante, mandolin; Carolina Alcaraz, Alejandro Sanz and Juan Antonio Martín, percussion; Nicasio Gradaille, piano; and Diego García Rodríguez, conductor.

George Crumb (Charleston, West Virginia, October 24, 1929), is one of the most important living composers on the current international scene and a key figure in the evolution of North American music in the second half of the 20th century. His enormous devotion to another of the most necessary artists of the 20th century, Federico García Lorca, led him to put music to a large number of texts by the poet from Granada over a period of half a century. His first approaches to Lorca’s work date back to the early 1960s, a decade in which he composed up to five works on texts from Libro de Poemas (1921), Poema del Cante Jondo (1921), Bodas de Sangre (1931) or Yerma (1934), but especially of Canciones (1927) and El Diván del Tamarit (1931). After a period of more than 15 years, he returned to Lorca in the mid-80s to put music to Canciones Infantiles, included in the poetry collection Canciones. And it is not until more than two decades later, and already at a very advanced age which hasn’t seen his passion for Federico diminished, that he faces his last three cycles so far, composed consecutively between 2008 and 2012.

Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo, integral Crumb-Lorca en el Festival de Granada

Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo has a long history of dedication to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, with special attention to Spanish and very particularly Galician composers, of whom it has premiered countless works, many of them dedicated to the ensemble. This Crumb-Lorca Project is an idea on which the TAC has been working for some years and that acquires a special significance for being carried out at the Federico Garcia Lorca Center in Granada. The TAC made his presentation at the Granada Festival in 2014 with a very interesting proposal that included Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, along with the absolute premiere of Cinco Guerreros by Sebastian Mariné, commissioned by the festival. On that occasion, the link between the two works was painting, through the work of Mark Rothko and José Guerrero, who was from Granada and was influenced by Rothko after meeting him in New York.

 
 
 
Pacho Flores and Hernández-Silva with the Nord Czech Philharmonic

Pacho Flores and Hernández-Silva with the Nord Czech Philharmonic

Pacho Flores and Hernández-Silva will offer a concert with the Nord Czech Philharmonic as part of the Beethoven Festival in Teplice, in the Czech Republic, next Thursday, June 17. Due to the restrictions still in force in the Central European country, the concert will be held without an audience and will later be broadcasted on June 27 on the orchestra’s YouTube channel and other platforms. The Nord Czech Philharmonic, Severočeská Filharmonie or Nordböhmische Philharmonie, in Teplice, is an orchestra that has been continuously active since 1838, and since 1964 it has been responsible for organizing the Beethoven Festival. Hernández-Silva has already conducted the Nord Czech Philharmonic on previous occasions, not so Pacho Flores, for whom this concert means his debut with the ensemble. The programme consists of two concerts for trumpet—the Concerto for Corno da Caccia, by Czech composer Neruda, and the Czech premiere of the Concierto de Otoño by Arturo Márquez—together with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

This collaboration with the Nord Czech Philharmonic is not the first between both artists; on the contrary, Pacho Flores and Hernández-Silva have a long history of joint presence with Spanish orchestras such as the Navarra Symphony Orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica de la Región de Murcia, the Malaga Philharmonic, the Simfònica de les Illes Balears and especially the Real Filharmonía de Galicia, with which they have performed several premieres and recorded the album Cantos y Revueltas for Deutsche Grammophon. New collaborations in Spain for the 2021/22 and 2022/23 seasons will be announced in due course, and new premieres are also planned with the Arctic Philharmonic in Norway or the Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine in France. Recently, they have also been together with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Bogota (Colombia).

Cantos y Revueltas, Extremadura Orchestra

Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño is the result of the project of shared commissions for new trumpet concerts that Pacho himself has started. The concert was commissioned and premiered by the Mexico National Orquestra (Carlos Miguel Prieto), Tucson Symphony Orchestra (José Luis Gómez), Hyogo PAC Orchestra of Japan (Michiyoshi Inoue) and the Oviedo Filarmonía (Lucas Macías). This Czech premiere with the Nord Czech Philharmonie is the twenty-third performance since the first premiere in September 2018—the fourth under the baton of Hernández-Silva—, after having been performed in Mexico, USA, Japan, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Poland and Colombia.

 
 
 
Marina Heredia at the Teatro Real with Heras-Casado

Marina Heredia at the Teatro Real with Heras-Casado

Marina Heredia will participate as a guest artist with Pablo Heras-Casado, Solidarity Ambassador of the NGO, in the VII Gran Concierto de Ayuda en Acción at the Teatro Real in Madrid where she will sing El Amor Brujo by Manuel de Falla together and the Madrid Symphony Orchestra, on 15 June. Apart from this debut at the Teatro Real, Marina Heredia has performed El Amor Brujo with Pablo Heras-Casado and some of the most important orchestras in the world, such as the Chicago Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. Together with the Orchestra of St Luke they performed this work at the Carnegie Hall in New York, and they will do it again next season with the Berlin Radio Orchestra in two mythical halls of the German capital such as the Philharmonie and the Konzerthaus.
 

In addition to Heras-Casado, Marina Heredia has often worked with some other important conductors on various occasions: Josep Vicent, at the Rouen Opera and the Lille Orchestra in France, and at the Palacio de Festivales de Cantabria; Manuel Hernández-Silva, in the spectacular production of La Fura del Baus at the Granada Festival with the Andalusian Youth Orchestra, and in a new collaboration with an important Spanish orchestra and festival that will be announced soon; or Antoni Ros Marbá, with the orchestra Ciudad de Granada at the Bilbao Musika-Música Festival. Marina Heredia became the most internationally demanded flamenco singer to afford the Falla’s El Amor Brujo.

Marina Heredia en el Teatro Real con Heras Casado

On the other hand, Marina Heredia continues her brilliant career as a flamenco singer. On June 18 and 19 she will present her show Lorca y la Pasión. Un mar de sueños at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid, and on June 25 she will launch her fifth album with Universal, Capricho, whose single ‘Se nos perdió el amor‘, recently released, has the participation of the amazing trumpet player Pacho Flores as a guest artist.


 

 

 

José Luis Gómez

José Luis Gómez, conductor Music Director of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra The Venezuelan-born, Spanish conductor José Luis Gomez began his musical career as a violinist but was catapulted to international attention when he won First Prize at the International Sir...