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.
Aarón Zapico opens the 72nd edition of the Granada International Music and Dance Festival at the Palace of Carlos V on Wednesday 21 and Thursday 22 June with a program on the figure of Don Quixote. The core piece will be Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro, in commemoration of the centenary of its premiere on June 25, 1923 at the palace of the Princess of Polignac in Paris, almost exactly 100 years ago. Aarón will lead the Ciudad de Granada Orchestra with Alicia Amo, soprano (Trujamán), David Alegret, tenor (Maese Pedro), José Antonio López, baritone (Don Quixote), Juan Carlos Garvayo, harpsichord, and the Compañía Etcétera, with Enrique Lanz as stage director and responsible for the puppets, set design and projections. The program, entitled El retablo de Maese Pedro. Un tríptico sobre Don Quijote, also includes Burlesque de Quichotte, overture-suite in G major, TWV 55:G1 (1716) by Georg Philipp Telemann, and a selection from Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, op. 97 (1743) by Joseph Bodin Boismortier.
As the festival explains, Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de Maese Pedro, one of the most unique and important stage works in the history of Spanish music, was premiered at the palace of the Princess of Polignac in Paris on June 25, 1923. Conceived as a brief chamber opera for puppets on an episode of Don Quixote, the work had already been heard in concert version in March of that same year at the Teatro San Fernando in Seville. For the Parisian premiere, Falla had the collaboration of professor, engraver and set designer Hermenegildo Lanz. In 2009, his grandson Enrique Lanz, director of the prestigious Compañía Etcétera, created giant puppets to present the play at the Teatro Real, and it is these puppets that will now arrive on the stage of the Alhambra, together with the OCG, Aarón Zapico, a group of select Spanish singers and a couple of Cervantine works from the Baroque period to complete the programme.
Aarón has just returned from Mexico after conducting the Academia de Música Antigua of the Universidad Autónoma de México in three concerts in various venues of the Mexican capital. The program was made up exclusively of works by Spanish Baroque composers such as José Castel, Francisco Hernández Illana, Vicente Baset, Antonio Literes, Mateo Flecha, José de Nebra, Sebastián Durón or Juan de Navas, grouped under the generic title of Fuego: an imaginary zarzuela of the Hispanic Baroque. Among Aarón’s upcoming commitments are his debuts at the Teatro Real in Madrid to conduct La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola di Alcina by Francesca Caccini, and at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, where he will conduct Antonio Literes’s Los Elementos. He will also lead orchestras such as the Real Filharmonía de Galicia, the Cordoba Orchestra or the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra. Aarón Zapico is a frequent guest at the Granada Festival. He made his debut in 2011 with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which were recorded on an album produced by Winter & Winter. In 2019, Forma Antiqva, the group directed by Zapico, was resident ensemble of the festival. He has also been a teacher in the Manuel de Falla Courses. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, he returned as a teacher and head of the Festival’s Baroque Academy.
Pacho Flores returns to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra to continue his artistic residency. After his visit last December, when he took part in five extraordinary Christmas concerts, he will appear this time at a subscription concert that will take place on May 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, where he will perform Henri Tomasi’s concerto as well as Albares, his own concerto for flugelhorn, all under the baton of Domingo Hindoyan.
The next and last concert of this residency will take place in July with the UK premiere of Altar de Bronce, Gabriela Ortiz’s trumpet concerto that had its World premiere last April with the Galician Symphony Orchestra under Manuel Hernández-Silva, along with Salseando, by Roberto Sierra. That premiere in Galicia was actually also part of an artistic residency, since this season Pacho has been artist-in-residence of these two orchestras, after being last summer at the La Virée Classique festival of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.
Pacho has just arrived from North America, where he presented the continental premieres of the orchestral version of his own work Cantos y Revueltas with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Rafael Payare; and Historias de Flores y Tangos, by Daniel Freiberg, with the Walla Walla Symphony Orchestra under José Luis Gómez. On his return from Liverpool, he will travel to Colombia to perform again Freiberg’s concerto together with Albares under the baton of Christian Vásquez, before facing an intense summer that includes, in addition to the aforementioned third visit to Liverpool, two important debuts in great summer seasons: at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, and at the Rady Shell of the San Diego Symphony with Rafael Payare, where he will perform Concierto de Otoño by Arturo Márquez and Salseando by Roberto Sierra, respectively.
José Luis Gómez and Pacho Flores meet with the Walla Walla Symphony Orchestra for the US premiere of Historias de Flores y Tangos, new trumpet concerto by Daniel Freiberg, which will take place at Cordiner Hall next Tuesday, May 2 at 7 p.m. The concert was commissioned jointly by the WW Symphony, Oviedo Filarmonía, Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería and Arctic Philharmonic of Norway. This US premiere closes the cycle of premieres reserved for the orchestras that participated in the shared commission, so that the work becomes now available for any orchestra that wishes to program it.
Gómez and Flores had already met at the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, of which the former is principal conductor, for the US premiere in January 2019 of the Concierto de Otoño by Arturo Márquez, as the orchestra was part of the consortium of commissioners of this piece to the Mexican composer, together with the Nacional de México, the Hyogo PAC Orchestra of Japan and, once again, the Oviedo Filarmonía. Pacho returned to Tucson again as recently as last February, accompanied on this occasion by Manuel Hernández-Silva, with a program that again included a couple of US premieres: Salseando, trumpet concerto by Roberto Sierra, and Manuel Moreno Buendía’s Boceto Sinfónico.
Pacho will return to the US a couple of times in the upcoming months, first in June to perform Salseando by Sierra with the San Diego Symphony and Rafael Payare at the Rady Shell, and then in July for his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut with Gustavo Dudamel at the Hollywood Bowl, performing Márquez’s Concierto de Otoño. For his part, and with a contract still in force until 2024, José Luis Gómez was renewed last summer in his position as Music Director of the Tucson Symphony until 2027, and has recently conducted orchestras such as the Indianapolis Symphony or the US National Symphony Orchestra.
Pacho Flores returns to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Rafael Payare after his great success last summer as resident artist of La Virée Classique, the summer festival organized by the Canadian orchestra, where he performed three different programs in his triple facet of trumpeter, composer and conductor. In this next concert, which will take place at the Maison Symphonique on Saturday, April 29 at 9 p.m., they will perform the American premiere of the full orchestra version of Cantos y revueltas, by Pacho Flores himself, whose world premiere took place a month ago with the Arctic Philharmonic of Norway under Manuel Hernández-Silva. On this occasion, Pacho will be accompanied by the cuatrista Héctor Molina and the maraquero Edgardo Jair Acosta.
Pacho Flores has just obtained an enormous success in his debut with the Galician Symphony Orchestra, where he has been a resident artist this season, offering up to three different programs: two symphonic programs, both conducted by Manuel Hernández-Silva, and a chamber music concert with the guitarist and cuatro player Jesús “Pingüino” González. This season Pacho is also an artist in residence at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, to which he will shortly pay his second visit this year for the UK premiere of Altar de Bronce, by Gabriela Ortiz, whose world premiere took place ago two weeks ago with the Galician Symphony, as both orchestras are part of the commissioning consortium for this new trumpet concert by the Mexican composer, together with the Orquesta de Minería de México, the New World Symphony and the San Diego Symphony.
After this concert with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Pacho will travel to the state of Washington, in the USA, for the last premiere of Daniel Freiberg’s Historias de Flores y Tangos with the Walla Walla Symphony Orchestra under the baton of José Luis Gómez. This Freiberg concert had its first premiere in Spain with the Oviedo Filarmonía, then with the Orquesta de Minería in Mexico and more recently in Norway with Manuel Hernández-Silva, as afore mentioned.
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