Frankfurt Radio Symphony / Andrés Orozco-Estrada RICHARD WAGNER Overtures & Preludes

Energy, elegance and spirit - this is what especially distinguishes Andrés Orozco-Estrada as a musician. In 2014/15, he took over the position as Chief Conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and became Music Director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. In the 2020/21 season he becomes also Principal Conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Medellín (Colombia), Andrés Orozco-Estrada began his musical studies on the violin. At the age of 15 he received his first conducting lessons and in 1997 he moved to Vienna in order to study at the University of Music and Performing Arts with Uroš Lajovic, himself a pupil of the legendary Hans Swarowsky. Orozco-Estrada lives in Vienna.

Frankfurt Radio Symphony / Andrés Orozco-Estrada RICHARD STRAUSS Eine Alpensinfonie

With its epic sweep and grandeur and compelling drama, there has rarely been such a spine-tingling and vivid depiction of nature as found in Richard Strauss’s magnificent tone poem, An Alpine Symphony. Calling for gargantuan orchestral forces, this lavishly illustrated journey is Strauss’s crowning orchestral achievement. Using a vast musical canvas packed with vivid and exquisite details, it’s a bold, optimistic and passionate work, unleashing ecstatic blazes of orchestral colour alongside moments of awestruck contemplation in a continuous narrative of 22 sections, which Strauss threads together with his usual mastery and aplomb.
The work is performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by podium sensation Andrés Orozco-Estrada. It marks their fourth release in a critically acclaimed series for PENTATONE. Their performance of Strauss’s Salome earned Gramophone magazine’s Editor’s Choice (January 2018). Gramophone also praised their Ein Heldenleben “...the playing has an easy virtuosity … the love music swells and swoons magnificently”. And for their first recording, the Stravinsky ballets The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, Gramophone lauded their ability “to unearth an astonishing amount of detail at relatively spacious tempi” and “PENTATONE’s awesomely precise recording”.

Houston Symphony / Andrés Orozco-Estrada MUSIC OF THE AMERICAS

Having demonstrated their musical excellence with three well-received recordings on PENTATONE of orchestral works of Antonin Dvořák, Houston Symphony and Andrés Orozco-Estrada now present an album that comes closer to their cultural roots than ever before. Dance rhythms, jazzy harmonies, bright colours, city sounds; everything one associates with The Americas can be heard on this recording. With George Gershwin’s 1928 piece An American in Paris, Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá (1938), Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1961) and Ástor Piazzolla’s Tangazo (1970), it brings together composers from across the twentieth century, all connected by their belonging to the Americas. Moreover, all of these composers reconfigured the barriers between classical and popular music, combining them to produce a sound that illustrates their home region. In choosing these particular works, Houston Symphony and Andrés Orozco-Estrada have aimed not to cover the entire continent but rather to provide ‘impressions’ of America and to ‘illuminate’ as many colours in the music as possible. 

Sensemayá showcases the highly original combination of native elements from the pre-colonial indigenous past with avant-garde techniques that characterizes the music of Mexican composer Revueltas. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, from which a suite of Symphonic Dances is featured on this album, belongs to the most popular and famous American music ever. Bernstein illuminates the story of two rival gangs in New York by juxtaposing a jazz-blues ‘American’ idiom with a more ‘Latin American’ Puerto Rican sound, in which the Cuban mambo and cha-cha, and the Mexican huapango are also integrated. Ástor Piazzolla’s Tangazo (grand tango) incorporates neo-classical elements such as a fugue into the national Argentinian dance music par excellence, realizing a reconciliation between native influences and trends in contemporary classical music. In Gershwin’s jazzy symphonic poem An American in Paris, city sounds temporarily give way to a sorrowful, homesickness blues, but the piece ends in regained excitement. (PENTATONE)

Leticia Moreno / Andrés Orozco-Estrada / London Philharmonic Orchestra PIAZZOLLA

Piazzolla is a journey through the musical universe of one of the most genuine and fascinating composers of the twentieth century. 

Together with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Andrés Orozco-Estrada and his quintet (Remy van Kesteren, Pablo Mainetti, José Gallardo and Janne Saksala), Moreno explores Piazzolla's endless sound possibilities and offers a vital and renewed vision of his most emblematic works. 

Piazzolla is the third album by the violinist for Deutsche Grammophon; a recording that pays homage to the composer on the 25th anniversary of his death and a project that Moreno will perform live in the best concert halls in Europe, the United States and Asia during the 2017/18 and 2018/19 seasons. 

The studio album was recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios (London) and Meistersaal (Berlin). Forthcoming concert highlights include the premiere of J. López-Aurora’s Violin Concerto with Houston Symphony as well as a tour with St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra and Yuri Temirkanov in Rimini.

Houston Symphony / Andrés Orozco-Estrada ANTONÍN DVORÁK Symphony No. 9 - 2 Slavonic Dances

Dvorak’s New World Symphony is counted among the most successful and distinctive symphonies ever written and it loses none of its drama or appeal on repeated playing. Inspired by American spirituals and Henry Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, this infectiously tuneful work with its brilliantly colourful orchestration and rhythmic verve has its creative wellspring in Dvorak’s own homesickness. It was condescendingly described by his critics as a “Czech composer’s impression of the country” but its qualities were never in doubt and its inventiveness and warmth radiate from every page. From beautiful, wistful melodies, to unfettered exuberance and glorious, sustained climaxes, this extraordinary symphony has it all.

This is Orozco-Estrada’s fifth recording for PENTATONE. His earlier discs of Dvorák symphonies were described as “Vivid and colourful, overall well balanced” (Pizzicato) “an interpretation full of theatricality, with a sure sense of the monumental” (Gramophone).

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