The Michigan State University Symphony Orchestra led by conductor Kevin Noe performed Lorenz’s En Tren Vá Changó (Destination Macondo) on Friday November 16, 2012.  It is the second time in eight years that this work is heard live on the MSU campus.  In 2004, then MSU Assistant Director of Orchestras Raphael Jiménez brought the work for the first time to the University’s Wharton Center.  This performance took place before Lorenz joint the MSU College of Music Faculty and only three years after En Tren Vá Changó received its premiere performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia Festival.  

Lorenz greeting conductor Bill Eddins and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra after the world premiere

The ten-minute symphonic opener was commissioned by Ravinia Festival to celebrate its 100th anniversary.  This was the first in a series of so-called “Train Commissions” meant to commemorate the fact that the grounds of the Festival were originally a train station that took Highland Park affluent residents to the city of Milwaukee and back.   “However,” writes Lorenz in the program notes, “my work does not paint images directly associated with trains.  Instead, it attempts to rap the listener in an exotic soundscape that I hope will seem distantly familiar and bestow upon the listener the type of attraction that trains had upon me as a child growing up in a country like Venezuela where locomotives had disappeared due to the enormous impact of the auto and oil industries.”  En Trén Vá Changó (Destination Macando) was recorded by the Moravian Philharmonic under Raphael Jiménez and released in 2009 by Navona Records.

After the recording session with Navona Records' Bob Lord and Raphael Jiménez (center)

Listen to WKAR 90.5FM for the genesis of En Tren Vá Changó recounted by composer Ricardo Lorenz and details of challenges the work presents to performers as explained by conductor Kevin Noe.

Lorenz speaking before the premiere of Habanera Science by the Dali Quartet Festival's Pre-College Orchestra

As Composer-in-Residence of the 9th Annual Dali Quartet Chamber Music Festival and Camp, Ricardo Lorenz spent several days this past summer 2012 in North Wales, Pennsylvania, working on two of his works with some of the East Coast’s most talented young string players.  Lorenz conducted his Rochela for nine cellos, originally composed for and premiered by the cello section of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and attended the premiere of a new string orchestra work composed especially for the Festival’s pre-college orchestra.  Titled Habanera Science, the work is conceived as a response to the news that the data collected from the recently discovered Higgs Boson particle, when fed into a computer, allegedly sounds like a habanera.  As he told the audience before the August 12th concert led by guest conductor Eddy Marcano, “after spending years studying Cuban music, and after a recent month-long stay in Havana, I can assure you that habaneras cannot arise from data fed into a computer.  Habaneras are born out of deep and profound longing for not only the city of Havana but, more significantly, its people and its culture.” 

Dali Quartet members with Lorenz and other Festival faculty

The 9th Dali Quartet Festival and Camp brought together some of the finest up-and-coming string players for a week of chamber music coaching, workshops, rehearsing, and concerts.   The faculty included the members of the Dali String Quartet, NYC Ballet Concertmaster Kurt Nikkanen, conductor and violinist Eddie Marcano, Annapolis Symphony Orchestra Concertmaster Netanel Draiblate, and Ricardo Lorenz among others.

Ricardo Lorenz attended the London premiere of his new work Cacerola Soul on May 3^rd, 2012 at the Southbank Centre.  Cacerola Soul roughly translates as “the soul of the frying pan” and calls for a SATB choir, instrumental ensemble and optional rapper.

Conductor Maite Aguirre & Lorenz following the London premiere of Cacerola Soul

The work was commissioned by The Iberian and Latin American Music Society of London (ILAMS) specifically to pay tribute to pot-banging protests as instruments of nonviolent resistance.  Cacerola Soul closed a concert that offered a kaleidoscopic view of five hundred years of Latin American classical music in honor of the recent bicentennial celebrations of Latin America’s independence. It featured London’s Latin Chamber Ensemble conducted by Maite Aguirre as well as other guest performers, including violinist/vocalist Omar Puente.  Known in South America as “cacerolazos,” these forms of public protests, led initially by middle-class women in Chile, began in the 1970s during the last years of Salvador Allende’s government.  After accepting the commission from ILAMS that specifically called for the incorporation of human voices as well as pots and pans, Ricardo Lorenz was surprised to find a lack of literature or poetry based upon the pot-banging phenomenon.

TV broadcast of an actual cacerolazo

Unable to find already existing text, he asked Venezuelan poet and friend Alfredo Pérez to write a suitable poem that would also reflect the fact that the United States was at the time besieged by the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. The result is a bilingual poem that credits middle-class women for the invention of the cacerolazo while inciting audience participation.  Before the concert at the Southbank’s Purcell Room, Lorenz offered a pre-concert lecture titled “Latin America’s art music: a simultaneous expression of reverence and irreverence towards the West.”

M. Horowitz interviews Sondheim during Liaisons' New York premiere

On April 21, 2012, Ricardo Lorenz attended the New York premiere of Liaisons: Re-imagining Sondheim from the Piano, a concert project involving over thirty of the world’s foremost contemporary composers, including Lorenz, and their solo piano creations based on Sondheim songs.  Produced by Rachel Colbert and performed by pianist and  co-producer Anthony de Mare, Liaisons gathers short piano pieces commissioned from composers such as Steve Reich, William Bolcom, Fred Hersch, Frederic Rzewski, Paul Moravec, Mason Bates, and two dozen others.

Liaisons' producer Rachel Colbert (center) with pianist/co-producer Anthony de Mare and Lorenz following the premiere

Regarding Lorenz’s re-imagination of Sondheim, the composer writes:  ”Summer of 1982 was wonderfully diabolic.  I danced a waltz with Mephistopheles and had my throat slit by the demon barber of Fleet Street.  I was a freshly arrived foreign student from Venezuela assigned to the Indiana University Opera chorus.  The summer opera season that year offered back-to-back performances of Gounod’s Faust and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.  Singing in Faust dressed like a monk was great but this didn’t compare to the experience of encountering the powerful world of Stephen Sondheim for the first time and in such an intimate way.  Since that summer, I’ve come to greatly admire his other musicals.  However, Sweeney Todd has always held a special place for me.  So when pianist Anthony de Mare approached me in 2010 about contributing to the Liaisons Project I knew right away that I would write something inspired by Sweeney Todd.   I chose to re-imagine The Worst Pies in London and Little Priest as a tongue-in-cheek, smorgasbord of Latin American grooves that preserve the original features and intent of these songs.  The Worst [Empanadas] in London, as I titled my re-imagination of Sondheim’s music, was possible through the support of the late Fredda Hyman and  Music in the Loft, who commissioned the work especially for the Liaisons Project.”

Read New York Times Anthony Tommasini’s review of Liaisons’ premiere at Symphony Space

Fredda Hyman in her music-filled loft (photo by Antonio Pérez for the Chicago Tribune)

On December 1^st, 2011 Music in the Loft founder Fredda Hyman passed away in her Chicago loft.  On that day, up and coming performers and composers lost one of their greatest champions.  As for myself, I lost one of my greatest friends and supporters, a surrogate mom and a confidant.  Please read my Tribute to Fredda Hyman, founder and artistic director for almost two decades of Music in the Loft.

Alcides Rodriguez performs Ricardo Lorenz’s Pataruco: Concerto for Venezuelan Maracas and Orchestra with the Orquestra Filarmonica de Minas Gerais conducted by Fabio Michetti. This performance was broadcasted on Brazil’s Rede Minas public television station.

Backstage after the Symphony in C premiere of Lorenz's viola concerto. L to R: Díaz, composer M. Contreras, Lorenz, violist A. Linares, Milanov, visual artist S. Amundaraín, and composer E. Amaya

A year after its first performance at Michigan State University, Ricardo Lorenz’s Viola Concerto received its East Coast premiere on October 15, 2011.  This time it was outside of Philadelphia, once again with violist Roberto Díaz for whom the concerto titled Canciones de Jara was especially composed, and this time accompanied by Symphony in C, a recently created professional training orchestra lead by conductor Rossen Milanov.   Lorenz’s concerto opened the orchestra’s 2011-2012 season along with staple works from the symphonic repertoire such as Listz’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

Though there appears to be a tension between the song short form -simple, with alternating verses and choruses- and the large symphonic form developed during the classical era in Europe, Lorenz uses Canciones de Jara to resolve some of those contradictions and explore the deeper meanings of Jara’s songs. ‘That’s what the symphonic context allows,’ he says. 

Courier Post’s Dave Allen previewing the East Coast premiere of Lorenz’s Canciones de Jara with Roberto Díaz and Symphony in C, conducted by Rossen Milanov.

Read entire article published in the CourierPostOnline.com

When one thinks of Cuba, one thinks of three things: tobacco, revolution, and music.  However, of these three emblems, music best defines the identity of the country.  Since more than a century and a half, music has allowed Cubans to remain attached to the past while at the same time respond to influences and demands from the present.  Throughout the dramatic history of Cuba —which includes slavery, independence from Spain, U.S. interventions, and a socialist-communist revolution among others—, music has always been there for Cubans to not only record events but to also adapt to them.  During a five-week study abroad program offered by Michigan State University in conjunction with Cuba’s Universidad de La Habana and Colegio San Gerónimo, Ricardo Lorenz will teach courses in Havana that will explore Cuban music as it reflects upon some of the country’s major historical events.

Contrasts between the old and the new Cuba are everywhere in Havana

Under the new federal guidelines that make it legal for U.S. citizens affiliated to educational institutions to visit Cuba, Lorenz will travel to the Island with MSU students and with his colleague Rene Hinojosa (College of Social Sciences), who is a veteran of the study abroad programs in Latin American and who has taught in Cuba on several occasions before. Lorenz will pay particular attention to how today, in the city of Havana, music is visibly contributing to stir the country towards a new era, an era in which the old revolutionary culture seems to be merging with a new individual entrepreneurship mindset. After coming back from a site visit to the city of Havana, Lorenz explained that he was most struck by “how humanity exults in Havana; how the energy, talent, and spirit of the Cubans greatly overwhelm the infrastructure of the city and the commodities available.”  While in Havana, Hinojosa and Lorenz met with two of the most distinguished Cuban musicians:  multi-instrumentalist Bobby Carcasses, founder of the Havana Jazz Festival, and

With López Gavilán and Dr. Mariana García at Havana's García Lorca Theater

composer and President of Cuba’s musicians union Guido López Gavilán, whom they met at a especial performance of Beethoven’s ninth symphony by the Harvard-Ratcliff Orchestra joined by Cuban soloists and choruses.  Lorenz is planning on having both Carcasses and López Gavilán offer guest lecture-presentations for the MSU students during the four-week study abroad program to take place in Cuba between May 7 and June 10, 2012.

Rumba Sinfónica, a thirty-minute concerto of sorts for Latin band and symphony orchestra, was the result of a close collaboration between composer Ricardo Lorenz and pianist/arranger Jorge Gómez.   Since its premiere

Jerusalem's Henry Crown Concert Hall

with the Minnesota Orchestra in the fall of 2007, Rumba Sinfónica has been performed two dozen times by Jorge Gómez’s band Tiempo Libre and different professional, college, and youth orchestras across the U.S. and Canada.   For the 2010-2011 season, Rumba Sinfónica traveled over the Atlantic Ocean and over the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas to receive premieres in Israel and Venezuela.   On November 3, 2011, two-time Grammy nominated Tiempo Libre performed the work with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra at this city’s world-renown Henry Crown Concert Hall.  In what Lorenz describes as “a new phase in the life of the work,” Rumba Sinfónica was performed for the first time by a band other than Tiempo Libre this past June 2011 in Venezuela.  A group made up of some of the best musician from the country’s salsa scene performed the work with the Orquesta Sinfónica Municipal de Caracas (OSMC) conducted by Rodolfo Saglimbeni.  The high caliber pick up band was lead by veteran timbal player Frank Márquez and included Guajeo’s singer Edgar “Dolor” Quijada, pianist José Martínez, and trumpet player Marino Zambrano, among others.  

Backstage after the Caracas premiere of Rumba Sinfónica with OSMC conductor Rodolfo Saglimbeni and members of the salsa band

“I wanted Jorge Gómez, who was instrumental in this collaboration, to be present and performing on stage at the South American premiere of Rumba Sinfónica,” said Lorenz, who went on to explain that the current political and economic climate of the country made it impossible to bring Cuban-born Gómez to Venezuela for this occasion.  After the Caracas’ premiere, however, Lorenz felt that it was a source of great pride to experience the work performed with such ease by a homegrown ensemble.   “These fantastic Venezuelan musicians were totally committed to the project and seemed to understand its musical significance as though they were co-owners,” said Lorenz, asserting that it made him confirm what he has always believed.  As he put it, “musically speaking, Cuba and Venezuela are almost like siblings.”   Perhaps this is one of the reasons that motivated OSMC Musical Director Rodolfo Saglimbeni to include Rumba Sinfónica in several upcoming programs of their 2011-2012 season.

Lorenz with faculty and students of the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico. Composer and Congress organizer Alfonso Fuentes appears fourth from right.

As a guest composer of the 2nd Congress of Musical Creation hosted by the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico in San Juan, Ricardo Lorenz attended the Caribbean premiere of his work Merengue en el Espejo and delivered a two-part lecture presentation on the topic of finding appropriate spaces for optimal musical creation. The Conservatory of Music’s composition faculty Alfonso Fuentes organized the multidisciplinary event that gathered composers and performers as well as visual artists, authors, musicologists, and folklorists during the dates of February 10-13, 2011.   Founded by the famous cellist Pablo Casals, the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2009 with the opening of a state-of-the-art, newly renovated 1882 building in the Miramar neighborhood of San Juan.   Lorenz’s flute duet Merengue en el Espejo was performed on the Congress’s closing concert by Josue Casillas and Jonatan Figueroa,

A session of tambores de fundamento offered at the 2nd Congress of Musical Creation

principal and assistant principal flutists of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra.  Chamber works by Puerto Ricans Alfonso Fuentes and Roberto Sierra, Cuban Guido López Gavilán, and Venezuelan Efrain Amaya where also performed on the final concert.  Other artists and scholars who offered lectures and presentations during the four days of the Congress were composer Efrain Amaya, dancer Awilda Sterling, musicologist Cristobal Díaz Ayala, percussionist Andrew Lázaro, sculptor Melquíadez Rosario, and Afro Cuban drummer José Ramírez.

Lorenz and Díaz

Read about Lorenz’s Canciones de Jara on the Discovery Channel’s Blog.

Read more about the premiere on the Michigan State News website.

Listen to Ricardo Lorenz talk about Canciones de Jara with Spartan Podcast host Russ White.

Listen to violist Roberto Díaz and conductor Leon Gregorian talk about the premiere of Canciones de Jara on NPR affiliate WKAR  90.5FM

On October 22, 2010 Violist Roberto Díaz premiered Ricardo Lorenz’s Canciones de Jara: Concerto for Viola and Orchestra with the Michigan State University Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leon Gregorian at the Wharton Center for Performing Arts.   After consecutive tenures as Principal Violist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra, Roberto Díaz currently heads the Curtis Institute of Music and performs extensively as a soloist worldwide.

Canciones de Jara bridges the old concerto model and the more recent genre of the so-called protest song. Lorenz’s intention was to merge the extraordinarily expressive range of violists Roberto Díaz and the lyrical, as well as narrative, content found in the songs by Chilean singer/songwriter Victor Jara (1932-1973). Without resorting to direct referencing (except for the Epilogue), the solo part conveys a wide range of moods embedded in Jara’s lyrics, melodies, and chord progressions.  It is almost as thought the viola impersonates the singer/songwriter as he navigates through the dramatic socio-political events that fueled his songs.   Sometimes with countertenor-like sweetness and other times with frightening baritone depth, Canciones de Jara captures widely contrasting emotions, whether it is the sad beauty of I Remember Amanda, the melodramatic condemnation present in Questions on behalf of Puerto Montt, the prophetic optimism of I Will Remain Here, or the elegiac stoicism of Song of the Miner.

Ricardo Lorenz on the genesis of Canciones de Jara: Concerto for viola and orchestra

I heard the songs of Victor Jara for the first time when I was twelve.  They were playing on my sister’s turntable along with songs by household names like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.  I remember vividly Jara’s Te Recuerdo Amanda (I Remember Amanda) or his rendition of Viglieti’s A Desalambrar (Cut the Bard Wire).  Above all else, it was his voice and dramatic delivery style that made a lasting impression on me.  This was in 1973, during the months following the military coup that swept Chile and sank the country into one of the most repressive regimes of the 20^th century.  Like my sister and I in Venezuela, many around the world followed in disbelieve the unfolding of this horrible period.  Victor Jara was among the many hundreds of Chileans murdered by the military junta during the onset of the repression.  But unlike many families of these victims who were told that their loved ones had simply disappeared (and were never seen or heard of again), Victor Jara’s widow was able to burry her husband.  It was his popularity that made it impossible for a clerk working at the makeshift morgue not to recognize him even after his handsome features, often watched on TV, were badly disfigured. Sadly, it was this same popularity that made it desirable for the military regime to make a macabre example of Victor Jara in order to instill fear upon any one voicing opposition.

Roberto Díaz working on the Epilogue of Canciones de Jara with guitarist Victor Márquez

Victor Jara was big already before his tragic death, both as a singer/songwriter of socially and politically driven songs as well as a theatre director with many international appearances.  But the fact that he became one of the first casualties of Chile’s military regime made Jara the quintessential protest singer.  A false rumor about his hands being amputated in front of a crowd after being forced to play his guitar spread quickly across the Globe, further elevating his status to that of a folk hero.

While living in Chicago in the late 1990s, I became better acquainted with the music of Victor Jara after arranging several of his songs for Macondo Stew, a Latin-fusion band I had with Chilean singer Claudia Pérez.  It was towards the end of my time with Macondo Stew that Roberto Díaz, then principal violist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, asked me to compose a concerto for him. After familiarizing myself with the intense and uniquely nuanced sound violist Roberto Díaz delivers, and with Jara’s songs fresh in my head at that time, I knew I had found a meaningful match in a new concerto for viola inspired by Victor Jara’s songs.  An invitation by MSU Symphony Director Leon Gregorian; a Grant from Michigan State University’s Office of the Vice-President for Research; and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship gave me the incentive and allowed me to compose the work.

Lorenz and Robert Benton

An international group of euphonium players and music institutions has joined forces to commission a work from Ricardo Lorenz that will feature the euphonium while calling for the same instrumentation of Leos Janacek’s seldom performed Cappricio for piano and winds.   The consortium is spearheaded by Robert Benton, currently on the University of Windsor Brass Faculty and hailed for being “a compelling performer and outstanding Embassador for the euphonium.”   Other distinguished euphonium players joining the commissioning consortium who will co-premiere Lorenz’s upcoming work are Hidenori Arai (Japan) , Tormod Flaten (Grieg Academy in Norway), Adam Frey (Emory University), Fritz Kaenzig (University of Michigan), Ken Kroesche (Oakland University), Jamie Lipton (Henderson University),  Cale Self (Western Georgia University), Pat Stuckemeyer (www.justforbrass.com), and Matt Van Emmerick (Sydney Conservatorium).  In addition, the Royal Northern College of Music (U.K.), Easter Michigan University and Michigan State University are also part of the consortium. The upcoming co-premieres are scheduled to take place during the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons.

“I’ve come to appreciate the immense expressive power and unique agility of the euphonium through my acquaintance with Robert,” says Lorenz who wants to write a work that, among other things, “exploits the contrast that exists between the tongued quality of the trombone, or the percussive quality of the piano, and the unmatched voice-like legato which the euphonium is capable of producing.”   Prior to this project, the Venezuelan-born composer was acquainted with the euphonium through some of the coastal music of neighboring Colombia, where the close cousin of the euphonium, the so-called Bombardino, is featured predominantly in traditional ensembles.   Perhaps some of this unique sound, still ringing in the composer’s mind, will make it into the newly commissioned piece.