Dave Weiland
Joana Carneiro, music director of the Berkeley Symphony
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Americas. “If we start to infuse programs with a sort of Latin tinge, we can hopefully start to reach out to different demographics,” he notes. Six months before Bairos’s appointment, another Texas orchestra, the Houston Symphony, announced that Colombianborn Andrés Orozco-Estrada would be its next music director. In an online promotional video, the orchestra’s managers tout the fact that Orozco-Estrada “possesses personality and a Hispanic background” and they note that he is fluent in Spanish, German, and English. The city’s mayor, Annise Parker, makes an appearance in the video, noting that the conductor has a “diverse story to fit into the local community.” Thanks to a large influx of immigrants over the past several decades, Houston has become what is sometimes termed a “majority minority” city, with 60 percent of its residents of African, Hispanic, or Asian descent. Hispanics constitute a 44 percent share, according to the 2010 Census, up from 37 percent in 2000. Orozco-Estrada follows Hans Graf, a 64-year-old Austrian who has led the ensemble for twelve years. Orozco-Estrada declined to be interviewed for this article, citing schedule conflicts. But there remains a reticence among Hispanic conductors to draw attention to their ethnicity, and in interviews, some dismissed suggestions that Spanish- or Latin-themed programs can serve as a community-engagement strategy. If anything, most conductors try to blend works by Hispanic composers with Latinthemed pieces from the European canon; a piece by Ginastera, Villa-Lobos, or Golijov will often sit beside Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, Copland’s El Salón México, or Bizet’s Carmen. “Music is music,” says Miguel HarthBedoya, the Peruvian-born music director of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra since 2000. “Only certain politicians have used music at certain times for a purpose. I want to stay away from that. If anything, our Hispanic community has become more attached to what we have become as an institution than to coming to hear music from Latin America.” Harth-Bedoya has been working steadily to bring more Hispanic music into the repertory through his multimedia project, Caminos del Inka, which he started in 2007 and has brought to a number of U.S. symphony
winter 2014