Basque National Orchestra Presents New Season With Robert Trevino as Music Director

It's a new era at the Basque National Orchestra. That much was clear at a press conference held this week in San Sebastian, where the orchestra has its base (though they are resident in cities across the Basque Country). Oriol Roch, the orchestra's General Manager, was presenting not only the 2017/18 season, but music lovers' first insight into the programming philosophy of Roch's big new hire, incoming Music Director Robert Trevino.

Much is expected of the highly-rated young American conductor and, Trevino and Roch both made clear, the new season would be varied, entertaining, adventurous and consequential. "Music can be transformative," Trevino has said, "and the making of music is an all-consuming effort. The world we live in is full of joys and substantial challenges. I believe humanity demands of we artists to look around at the world and inspire, elevate, console and reflect. We see in the world violence and division; but we also see everywhere humanity's capacity for love, for the creation of beauty. With music, it's possible to redicover who and what we can be together. This is what we in music, whether we be making music or listening to it, must keep in mind, and that's how it can come to have a positive impact in the world." Therefore, he announced, this first season will be guided by a theme of resistance and reconciliation.

Being a composer that Trevino holds dear to his heart, and one who perfectly fits this theme, the music of Shostakovich will figure greatly, but so will that of the Russian composer's friend and contemporary Benjamin Britten, whose music has not often been heard there. "Both of these composers, in their very different ways, were extremely affected by the traumas of their time," says Trevino, "They are linked by more than just their friendship. The music of both is filled with a sense of a struggle for beauty in a world that had chosen to abandon its humanity."

One of the Britten works Trevino will introduce is Britten's large-scale Sinfonia da Requiem, a piece that hit both cultural and then political hurdles (composed as a gesture from Great Britain to then-ally Japan, the Japanese rejected it because of its Christian framework and because it was not celebratory enough, and then the ?entry of Japan into World War Two severed relations between the two nations and any further discussion of the matter). Trevino will conduct it in concerts also including Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.

Other Britten works to be featured through the season include the Violin Concerto and Les illuminations. Shostakovich works will also include his Eleventh Symphony, and his Violin Concerto No. 2.

Trevino, who will conduct five programs during the season, will open the season in October 2017, with Brahms's Song of Destiny, Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and Mahler's mighty First Symphony. He will close the season with one of the great choral masterpieces of the repertoire, Verdi's Requiem.

Other conductors to appear in the season will include Principal Guest Conductor Andrey Boreyko, Lawrence Foster, Hakan Hardenberger, Jose Miguel Perez-Sierra, and Clemens Schuldt. Soloists include Frank-Peter Zimmerman, Dmitri Makhtin, Ivan Monighetti, Simone Lamsma and Nicolai Lugansky,

For full season details, please see the Basque National Orchestra's website. ?

The Basque National Orchestra, founded in 1982, quickly made its mark as one of the finest ensembles in the Spanish region and beyond. With more than 7,000 subscribers It annually plays to some 150,000 spectators every year. Its current Music Director is Jun Märkl and previous Music Directors have included Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Gilbert Varga, Mario Venzago, and others, including founding Music Director Enrique Jordá. Its Principal Guest Conductor is Andrey Boreyko. The orchestras gives more than 100 concerts per year, and regularly hosts many of the world's leading conductors and soloists, among them, variously, Krysztof Penderecki, Paul McCreesh, Jesús Lopez Cóbos, Mischa Maisky, Leonidas Kavakos, Radu Lupu, Maria Joao Pires, Martin Fröst and Hélène Grimaud.

Robert Trevino first achieved widespread recognition on the international scene when in 2013 he substituted for Vasily Sinaisky to conduct Verdi's Don Carlo at the Bolshoi Theatre, prompting ecstatic reviews and a Golden Mask Award nomination. Previous to that, Trevino studied with his mentor David Zinman as an Aspen Conducting Fellow where he won the James Conlon Prize for Excellence in Conducting. James Levine selected him to be the Seiji Ozawa Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Festival, and he has also studied with Michael Tilson Thomas and Leif Segerstam (whom he assisted at the Helsinki Philharmonic). He has been Associate Conductor at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (2011-2015) and held the same title for New York City Opera (2009-2011), where he also worked on the world premieres of five new operas.

The past two seasons have seen many major debuts, among them the Vienna Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Rundfunk SInfonieorchester Berlin, Munich Philharmonic, Bamberg Symphony, Dresden Philharmonic, Orchestre Nationale de France, St Petersburg Philharmonic, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic and Danish Radio Symphony.

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