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
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.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
