After making his debut with the Sinfónica de Baleares in Spain and appearing with the Sinfónica de Navarra, where he is Music and Artistic Director, at the Auditorio Nacional in Madrid within the Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid subscription series, Perry So returns to the US to conduct the Tucson Symphony on February 4 and 5. The program consists of Luigi Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna, Schumann’s piano concerto with Michelle Cann as soloist, and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4, Italiana.
Perry So was born in 1982 in Hong Kong, where he received his early musical training in piano, organ, violin, viola, and composition. He received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University with a concentration in Central European music and literature of the modernist period, during which time he founded an academic orchestra and conducted the university’s opera company. He studied conducting at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore under the tutelage of teacher Gustav Meier and in 2008 he received the First Prize and the Special Prize at the 5th Edition of the Prokofiev International Conducting Competition in St. Petersburg. Following this recognition, he was appointed Assistant Conductor and then Associate Conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel Conducting Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and artistic collaborator of the Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias, and is also a member of the Orchestra Conducting Department of the Manhattan School of Music. Since the 2022/23 season, he is Music and Artistic Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra.
Present in concert halls on five continents, Perry So has recently made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony, his European operatic debut at the Royal Danish Opera with The Magic Flute, and his American debut at the Yale Opera with Eugene Onegin. Outstanding performances include a tour of Italy with the Nuremberg Symphony, a seven-week tour of South Africa leading three different orchestras in which he conducted Verdi’s Requiem in Cape Town for the South African National Arts Festival, or his return to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony. He has had a long-standing collaboration with the Royal Danish Theater and the Royal Danish Orchestra both in the concert hall and in the opera and ballet pit. He has been a frequent guest at Walt Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles and in 2013 he toured the Balkans leading the Zagreb Philharmonic in the first series of cultural exchanges established after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Other debuts in recent years include appearances with the Cleveland and Minnesota Orchestras, the Navarra, Málaga, Tenerife, Nuremberg, Israel, New Zealand, Houston, Detroit, New Jersey and Shanghai Symphony Orchestras, the London, Szezcin, Seoul and China Philharmonics, the Residentie Orkest of The Hague and the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie of Koblenz. His work in the recording studio spans a wide range of 20th-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 Violin Concertos with Alexander Gilman and the Cape Town Philharmonic received the Diapason d’Or in January 2012. His broad musical interests include numerous World premieres on four continents, as well as reintroducing Renaissance and Baroque repertoire into symphony programs, most notably the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau. His work with young musicians has taken him to the Australian Youth Orchestra, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, the Round Top Festival, the Manhattan School of Music, the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts and the Yale School of Music. Perry, his wife Anna and their daughter Caroline divide their time between Boston, Saint Paul, where Anna is Professor of History of Science at the University of Minnesota, and Pamplona.
Marina Heredia will sing at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin next Wednesday, November 23, accompanied by her usual collaborators José Quevedo ‘Bolita’ on guitar and Paquito González on percussion, as special guests of Avi Avital and his Between Worlds Ensemble in a program dedicated to the music of the Iberian Peninsula that includes arrangements of classical compositions by Falla, Albéniz and Granados together with flamenco pieces and other popular music in new arrangements made especially for the occasion.
Mandolinist Avi Avital has long enjoyed crossing musical boundaries. This season, he brings a series of three concerts to the Pierre Boulez Saal that reflect his broad inspiration and interests. Between Worlds is an exploration of different genres, cultures and musical worlds: at the center of the project is the Between Worlds Ensemble, founded by Avital in 2014 and made up of ten classically trained musicians who are equally comfortable in non-classical repertoire. For each of the three concerts, this core group will be joined by various artists or an ensemble representing a specific cultural and geographic region from around the world, in programs that include classical pieces as well as traditional and folk music in newly created arrangements. “The feeling of being at home in places that seem strange and even discovering aspects of yourself is an idea that I find very moving,” says Avital. “That philosophy is at the heart of this project.” To open the cycle, Marina Heredia, one of the most fascinating voices of current flamenco, will become part of the Between Worlds Ensemble, together with José Quevedo “Bolita” and Paquito González in a program dedicated to the music of the Iberian Peninsula.
Marina Heredia has just inaugurated her artistic residence in the season of the Duisburger Philharmoniker with which she sang El Amor Brujo by Falla and as soon as she gets off the plane from Berlin she will join the Radio TV Spanish Orchestra for the rehearsals of El Amor Brujo, which she will sing on December 2 at the Kursaal Theater in Melilla under the direction of conductor Isabel Rubio. This first visit to Duisburg included a concert by her quintet, various educational activities and a round table on flamenco. In a second visit that will take place in June 2023, the world premiere of En Libertad will take place under the direction of Josep Pons, a new work commissioned by the orchestra and composed together by José Quevedo ‘Bolita’ and Joan Albert Amargós, on texts by Quevedo himself, based on an idea by Marina Heredia. As on the first occasion, the concert with the orchestra will be accompanied by a new show by her flamenco company and related activities.
Marina Heredia will be artist-in-residence of the Duisburger Philharmoniker in the 2022/23 symphony season. After a season that saw her debuts with the Orquesta da Casa da Música do Porto or the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin, and a summer that took her to the Granada International Music and Dance Festival and to Hamburg as a guest of the Martha Argerich Festival at the Laieszhalle of the Elbphilharmonie, Marina begun this season at the Lausitz Festival in Görlitz, the Seville Biennale or the inaugural concert of the Navarra Symphony Orchestra season, which was also the presentation of maestro Perry So as its new Musica and artistic Director, Marina will visit Duisburg up to four occasions to offer various concerts, both with the orchestra and with his flamenco company.
Marina’s residency begins with the quintessential work for cantaora with symphony orchestra, El Amor Brujo by Manuel de Falla. These concerts will take place at the Mercatorhalle in Duisburg, the orchestra’s usual venue, on November 9 and 10, under the direction of its principal conductor, Axel Kober. Next, on the 12th of that month in the same room, she will offer a flamenco recital with her company in quintet format, accompanied by guitar (José Quevedo ‘Bolita’), percussion (Paquito González) and choir / clapping (Fita Heredia and Anabel Rivera).
The second symphonic date will be at the end of the season and it will be the premiere of En Libertad! a work commissioned by the orchestra, composed jointly by José Quevedo ‘Bolita’ and Joan Albert Amargós, which will be conducted by Josep Pons on June 28 and 29. Quevedo, also the author of the texts, has based himself on the journey of the gypsy people from its original origins in the East to the Iberian Peninsula and, particularly, Andalusia. The residency closes with a new flamenco recital on July 1 whose program is based on the cantaora’s latest album, CAPRICHO, and which will feature the participation of musicians from the Duisburger Philharmoniker as guests along with the company’s musicians.
Pacho Flores makes his debut with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (New York) under the direction of its Music Director JoAnn Falletta with a program that includes Haydn’s trumpet concerto and Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño. The concerts will take place on October 28 and 29 at the Kleinhans Music Hall in the city of Buffalo. This is the first stop on a brief US tour that will also take him to New Hampshire and California, with Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño as a kind of common thread.
In New Hampshire, he will stop at the Hopkins Center for the Arts of Dartmouth College, in the city of Hanover, to present, together with the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble, the world premiere of his own work Cantos y Revueltas as well as of the Concierto de Otoño, both in arrangement for symphonic band. The first piece, in which he will be accompanied by Venezuelan cuatro player Héctor Molina, will be conducted by Brian E. Messier, and the second by Luis Manuel Sánchez. The concert will take place on November 1 at the Spaulding Auditorium.
He will then travel to California for his third debut on this tour, this time with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Carlos Miguel Prieto, with which he will again perform Arturo Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño at the Davis Symphony Hall on November 5. The Concierto de Otoño, commissioned by the National Orchestra of Mexico, the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, the Hyogo Pac Orchestra of Japan and the Oviedo Filarmonía, is part of Pacho’s latest album for Deutsche Grammophon, ESTIRPE, together with Paquito D’Rivera’s Concerto Venezolano, Concierto Mestizo by Efraín Oscher and Crónicas Latinoamericanas by Daniel Freiberg, in addition to Morocota, a brief Venezuelan waltz by Pacho himself, recorded with Carlos Miguel Prieto and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería.
Manuel Hernández-Silva has assembled a team of Spanish-Venezuelan musicians along with Pacho Flores and Jesús ‘Pingüino’ González, for his debut with the Cyprus National Symphony Orchestra. The first part of the concert is dedicated to the traditional repertoire with a Symphony No. 6 by Franz Schubert to give rise in the second to a Latin festival around the trumpet in which a good part of the repertoire is by Pacho Flores himself and includes Heteronimos, a brief concertino for trumpet based on the different voices created by the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa for his literary expression; the Aria-cantinela of the Bachiana Brasileira nº 5 by Villalobos; Revirado, by Piazzolla; and Cantos y Revueltas. Fantasia Concertante for trumpet, Venezuelan Cuatro and strings, again by the trumpeter himself.
Cantos y Revueltas is the first work for orchestra composed by Pacho Flores and was premiered with Manuel Hernández-Silva and the cuatrista Leo Rondón together with the Real Filharmonía de Galicia in January 2018 on a mini-tour through Vigo, Santiago and A Coruña. Those concerts were recorded and gave rise to Pacho’s fourth album for Deutsche Grammophon with the same title as the work. Since then, Cantos y Revueltas has been performed by various orchestras around the world, such as the Murcia Region Symphony, the Miami Bolívar Philharmonic, the Texas Christian University Latin American Festival, the Malaga Philharmonic, the Navarra Symphony, the Jalisco Philharmonic, the Orquesta of Extremadura, Bogotá Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Valencia Orchestra, Castilla y León Symphony, Gran Canaria Philharmonic, Montreal Symphony and Minería Orchestra in Mexico, most of them conducted by Manuel Hernández-Silva but also by Carlos Miguel Prieto, Rafael Payare or Domingo Hindoyan. Heterónimos premiered with the Murcia Region Symphony last April 2022 at the Víctor Villegas Auditorium with Pacho himself conducting.
Jesús González Brito, alias ‘Pingüino’, is a guitarist, cuatro player, double bass player, composer and pedagogue with whom Pacho has collaborated on many occasions including a phonographic record for Deutsche Grammophon, ENTROPÍA, perhaps Pacho’s most intimate and chamber music album to date. date, which brings together a good number of classic songs from Latin American popular music along with new works due to both Pacho and ‘Pingüino’ and which won the gold medal at the Global Music Awards.
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