MIGUEL HARTH-BEDOYA

CONDUCTOR

 

Grammy®-nominated and Emmy Award-winning conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya is currently Chief Conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra in Oslo, and has embarked on his 17th season as Music Director of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Caminos del Inka, Inc., a not-for-profit organization dedicated to performing and promoting the music of the Americas.

 

As a guest conductor, Harth-Bedoya has led top American orchestras in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Baltimore, and New York. He is a regular guest at major North American summer academies including Aspen, Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Grand Teton. He has conducted the Orchestre de Paris, London Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Zurich Tonhalle, Bremen Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and the Finnish, Danish, and Swedish Radio Symphony orchestras, among others, and has also conducted throughout Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and South America.

 

Equally at home in opera, in the summer of 2015 Harth-Bedoya led the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s critically acclaimed first opera Cold Mountain with the Santa Fe Opera. Other notable productions include Puccini’s La Bohème (English National Opera directed by Jonathan Miller), Golijov’s Ainadamar (Cincinnati Opera and Santa Fe Opera); and Rossini’s Barber of Seville (Canadian Opera Company).

 

Harth-Bedoya’s discography features three recordings for Harmonia Mundi with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, as well as two albums and a third planned for late 2017 with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. He has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon with Katia and Marielle Labèque, with Juan Diego Flórez for Decca, and with Yo-Yo Ma and the Chicago Symphony for CSO Resound.

 

Born and raised in Peru, Harth-Bedoya earned his Bachelor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music and his Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School, both under the guidance of Otto-Werner Mueller. He also studied with Seiji Ozawa and Gustav Meier at Tanglewood.

 

He is an environmental advocate committed to a zero-waste lifestyle, and works actively in his home base of Fort Worth to fight issues of excessive waste. In 2016 he cofounded Cowboy Compost, whose aim is to reduce food waste.

 

ALEXANDRE DA COSTA

VIOLIN

As a young child, Montreal-born Alexandre Da Costa showed a marked gift for the violin and piano. Aged nine, he performed his first concerts with stunning virtuosity on both instruments and achieved recognition as a prodigy. Choosing the violin for his professional career, with the encouragement of Charles Dutoit he was soon performing regularly as a soloist with orchestra and in recital. He graduated with a Master’s degree and First Prize in Violin from the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal, and a Bachelor’s degree in Piano from the Université de Montréal. He pursued studies at the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofia in Madrid with legendary teacher Zakhar Bron, who became his mentor, and post-graduate studies in Vienna. He currently is completing a Ph.D.

 

Da Costa is a Sony Classical Artist and the winner of a 2012 JUNO Award, multiple awards and grants, and dozens of national and international violin competitions. He has given close to two thousand concerts and recitals in the most prestigious concert halls, performed live and recorded as guest soloist with more than a 100 different orchestras internationally, under conductors such as Frühbeck de Burgos, Slatkin, Maazel, Nézet-Séguin, Sokhiev, Petrenko, Bamert, Axelrod, Wildner, and Oundjian. His live performances are broadcast on state radios across the world and he has given world premieres of works by Elliott Carter, Michael Daugherty, Lorenzo Palomo, Paul Sarcich, Jean Lesage, and Airat Ichmouratov. An active chamber musician, he recently recorded the complete violin sonatas by Brahms with pianist Wonny Song. His discography comprises 25 CDs on the Sony Classical, Warner Classics, JVC/Victor, Naxos, Acacia Classics/Universal, ATMA, XXI-21, and Octave/Universal labels.

 

Alexandre Da Costa is Music Director of the Acacia Ensemble (Canada) and the Indian Ocean Ensemble (Australia), and regularly plays with and conducts the Queen Sofia Royal Chamber Orchestra, the Virtuosos of Venezuela Symphony, and the Vienna Symphony, among others. He is Associate Professor at the Edith Cowan University (Australia) and regularly gives master classes around the world. Alexandre Da Costa plays a 1701 Stradivarius loaned by friends Guy and Maryse.

A common thread linking the composers whose works are featured here is their ability to blend established Western art music with the traditions of their home countries. In doing so, they created the artistic conditions whereby their own fascinating personality found expression.

 

 

JIMMY LÓPEZ

Born in Lima (Peru), October 21, 1978

 

Per Negro

 

Per Negro, composed in 2012, was commissioned by conductor Miguel Harth-Beyoda to mark the centenary of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. Under the latter’s direction, this orchestra premiered the work on May 17, 2013, in its home location of Fort Worth, Texas.

 

Per Negro comprises six sections based on songs from the Afro-Peruvian folklore. Although intended as a tribute to his Afro-Peruvian heritage, López refrained from direct imitation or reproduction of traditional songs associated with this culture, opting instead for a fusion between them and his own compositional language, and creating a completely original work. The orchestration, for instance, calls for a symphonic formation with the addition of several traditional Afro-Peruvian percussion instruments. The composition’s overall structure unfolds in crescendos of tempo interspersed with moments of respite and culminating with maximum intensity, driven by Afro-Peruvian rhythms.

 

As an acknowledgement of his many years of collaboration with Harth-Bedoya, Jimmy López wrote the work’s initial motif as the four notes that spell out the initials of the conductor’s full name (Miguel Harth-Bedoya-Gonzles) in English notation. Heard at the horn at the outset, this musical gesture is reiterated at the very end of the piece, which concludes on a unison E corresponding to the first letter of the conductor’s surname.

 

 

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA

Born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on March 11, 1921 – Died in Buenos Aires, on July 4, 1992

 

Las cuatro estaciones porteñas [The Four Seasons], tango cycle

(arr. Leonid Desyatnikov for string orchestra and solo violin)

 

If Astor Piazzolla’s name is inevitably bound to the Argentinian tango, it is partly thanks to his teacher Nadia Boulanger’s intuition concerning his true musical personality, and her encouragement to develop his compositional style within the tango genre. Piazzolla later thanked Nadia Boulanger: “she helped me to become myself, to be Astor Piazzolla”.

 

In Las cuatro estaciones porteñas, which seeks to embody the moods and characters of the four seasons in Buenos Aires, melodic phrasing and rhythmic pulse are clearly those of the tango, and are heard throughout. The work was not, however, originally written in its unified form, each of its four sections being composed separately and in its own individual context. Piazzolla wrote Verano porteño in 1965 for his quintet of bandoneon, electric guitar, violin, piano, and double bass. It was not until sometime between 1969 and 1970 that he composed the three remaining movements, Invierno porteño, Otoño porteño, and Primavera porteño, grouping them together with Verano porteño under the title of Cuatro estaciones porteñas. Piazzolla and his musicians premiered the piece in May 1970 at the Teatro Regina in Buenos Aires.

 

Piazzolla’s original version met with considerable success and went on to inspire various arrangements, notably one for string orchestra and solo violin performed in the late 1990s by violinist Gidon Kremer and composer Leonid Desyatnikov. Apart from changing the orchestration, Desyatnikov altered the original version by inserting melodic fragments from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in each of the four estaciones by Piazzolla. In so doing, interestingly Desyatnikov factored in the timing of the seasons as they occur in separate hemispheres of the globe. In his citations of Vivaldi, for example, he associated Vivaldi’s Italian summer with Piazzolla’s Argentinian winter.

 

 

SILVESTRE REVUELTAS

Born in Santiago Papasquiaro, Mexico, December 31, 1899 – Died in Mexico City, October 5, 1940

 

La noche de los Mayas [The Night of the Mayas]

 

It is not uncommon for a film soundtrack’s success to surpass that of the film itself. Such is the case with Silvestre Revueltas’s La noche de los Mayas, written for the eponymous movie.

 

Directed by Chano Urueto, the film was released in 1939 to only fleeting box-office success but amid glowing critical acclaim. La noche de los Mayas was, however, one of the rare Mexican films at the time to maintain its Mexican identity in the context of a Hollywood-dominated film industry. The script is an adaptation of Antonio Mediz Bolio’s account of a Mayan tribe living in the jungle of Yucatn and forced to confront modern civilization when a white man comes to exploit their forest’s resources. The story verges on the melodramatic and culminates in tragedy. Revueltas’s soundtrack employs the familiar colours of orchestral instruments, enlivened by highly percussive rhythms and creating an atmosphere well suited to the narrative drama of the movie.

 

In 1960, conductor Jose Ives Limantour contributed to the legacy of music from La noche de los Mayas by adapting it in a suite of four movements, each of which he titled himself. Richer in musical material than the original soundtrack, Limantour’s arrangement is based on Revueltas’s manuscript rather than on the music as it is heard in the film. The suite was premiered on January 30, 1961, by the Guadalajara Symphony Orchestra conducted by Limantour.

 

Proclaiming his music to be firmly rooted in “the Mexican spirit”, Revueltas integrated characteristics of traditional Mexican music in his own musical idiom. Banishing clichés and firmly refusing any appropriation of his works by popular culture, Revueltas played an important role in forging Mexican national musical style, much like Dvořák had done for Czech music with his use of Bohemian folklore.