Director to open symphony season that ponders sense of place
Andrés Orozco-Estrada plans to open the Houston Symphony’s season with a star and then a sunrise.
Sir Ben Kingsley will appear at the symphony’s openingnight show Saturday to narrate Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” A week later, the musical director and conductor chose Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 to start the new season, a piece of music that begins with an understated resplendence that can still produce chills nearly 130 years after it premiered.
“It’s modern, different, natural,” Orozco-Estrada says of the violins that awaken and set the piece into motion. “The first rays of the sun coming and awakening to something natural.”
The trancelike effect achieved early in Mahler No. 1 doesn’t last. The piece steers into tempestuous territory, reflecting its composer’s complicated existence as a man with a complex definition of home. A Germanspeaking Austrian Jew born in Bohemia, Mahler was a multifaceted cultural outcast.
He’s the perfect composer to open a season of music in which Orozco-Estrada contemplates
place — where you were, where you are, where you are going.
Themes regarding “home” are threaded through the symphony’s forthcoming season, which fits Orozco-Estrada’s own existence as a composer whose life settles, in part, in Vienna; London; Frankfurt, Germany; Medellín, Colombia; and Houston.
“I’m traveling most of the year, weeks here in Houston, weeks in London, some weeks in my second home, which is Vienna,” he says. “That leaves very little time in Colombia, which is my home. So I do think about what home is. What makes you feel at home?
“For me it’s a combination of a place where you feel good, that you appreciate. And also as a conductor, a place where you feel connected to the orchestra. Like Houston: This is home. Also a place to spend time with your family. So the strongest connection between these different things, for me, is the music. It can link and bridge these different places and moments and feelings. So it makes sense for me to bring some part of my home, music, with me like a turtle.”
Orozco-Estrada finds little commonalities between the composers selected for a season. He suggests the sun motif in Mahler’s No. 1, which the symphony will perform starting Sept. 23, and Joseph Haydn’s “The Creation,” the second program in the season, which starts Sept. 29.
“Both have this feeling of being awakened by the sun, but ‘The Creation’ was nearly 100 years before and more connected with a religious touch,” he says. “So you can see the contrasts and similarities between two different and beautiful pieces of music.”
Music is so often parsed for its distinguishing characteristics — it’s refreshing to hear Orozco-Estrada speak of them with a long view that finds in them empathetic commonalities: reconciling an affinity for the familiar with an urge toward exploration.
Such an approach fits the young conductor.
Orozco-Estrada, 38, played violin and began conducting in his hometown of Medellín, a large city nestled in the Andes in Colombia. Studies at the Vienna Music Academy took him nearly 6,000 miles across the ocean and into conducting.
A substitution appearance with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 2010 pushed him further onto a path that currently has him working with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and serving as principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
This is his third season with the Houston Symphony. He will conduct half of the 18 shows in the symphony’s lineup.
The Mahler piece will be paired with music composed by the winner of the Houston Symphony’s Young Composer Competition. Orozco-Estrada says such programs are “our duty — to provide these opportunities. People say you have to be more modern. Well, that’s a challenge we meet with excitement. It’s the first time we’ve opened a season with a brand-new piece. Let’s see what happens.”
Though Orozco-Estrada says he draws the most excitement while conducting, he still relishes the chance to “think about combining pieces and coming up with themes and contrasts that run through the entire arc of the season. The whole arc. To have the variety and colors the orchestra needs to keep it at a certain level. There’s a magical journey every time we start planning, that becomes more magical when we start performing.”
Sometimes the approach pairs music by composers from opposite sides of the world.
Pianist Denis Kozhukhin joins the symphony in January for a program that includes Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 as well as two pieces by very different American composers: George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” with its jazzy influence, and the more modern “Doctor Atomic Symphony” by John Adams.
Rachmaninoff also will be represented in November by his Symphony No. 2, paired with Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto.
The scope of the Americas will inform a February performance that includes pieces by composers from the United States, Argentina and Mexico. Two shows in March are built around works by Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 Pastoral and Symphony No. 7, followed by his opera “Fidelio.”
In May, the symphony’s composer-in-residence Gabriela Lena Frank will have her “Requiem” performed for the first time. The cross-cultural piece includes text commissioned by Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz. The program with that world premiere also features Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.
“That’s another strong emotional piece about the human being,” Orozco-Estrada says. “Only this time, it’s about war and the complicated political situation in Russia. It’s powerful stuff that still feels important.”
Several of the shows will include the “On Stage Insights With Andrés,” offering Orozco-Estrada the opportunity to discuss the music.
“All of us human beings normally feel more comfortable when we know the way, the final destination,” he says. “I’m convinced the people in this city like to be challenged a little, so I try to bring some pieces and then help them enjoy that challenge. They don’t necessarily need the map, but sometimes it’s nice to know where we’re going.”
So Orozco-Estrada threads together music from all over the world, across centuries, into a language that he hopes connects listeners, part of a life he’s built for himself that requires regular transit across hemispheres.
“What can I do?” he says, smiling. “The classical music world is like this. You have to be everywhere.”
“There’s a magical journey every time we start planning, that becomes more magical when we start performing.” Andres Orozco-Estrada, Houston Symphony musical director and conductor