I grew up in Venezuela, where maracas are part of the culture… in almost every household there is a pair. doing it someday, but programming has to make sense, and he couldn’t promise that it would be soon. When they asked me to perform it this season, I was thrilled. Encore: You’re primarily known as a clarinetist, but how did your expertise with maracas come about? Rodriguez: It started about maybe 19 years ago. That’s how long I’ve been in the United States. Experiencing a new culture, that’s when you realize and understand how much you miss some things from home. When I was in my first college semester, I started missing all that. The first time I went back to Venezuela I actually got myself a pair of maracas. The very interesting story about this is that the person that made the maracas that I’m playing is Maximo Teppa. He’s a very famous maracas maker. Every percussionist in the world knows maracas by Maximo Teppa. What I didn’t know was that he lives in my home town. I went back and I called him and he said come over. I had some basic knowledge of how to play, how to move, but he’s the one that started to show me how to do certain techniques, some of the things I do in the concerto. Every time I went back to Venezuela I would visit him. We would get together and talk, and I would buy his maracas to sell in the U.S. That’s how percussionists started to know about me,
because I would show them how to play. It seems like an easy instrument to play but it’s actually complicated. By going to Venezuela and getting together with Maximo, I started to get more into the whole technique of the maracas. When I would come back to the United States, I would practice and practice, and figure out rhythms and listen to recordings of Venezuelan music. On one visit he offered me a CD which was a recording of this Concerto for Maracas by Ricardo Lorenz. Playing maracas on the recording was Ed Harrison, Principal Timpanist of the Chicago Lyric Opera. He’s the one that premiered the concerto with the Chicago Sinfonietta. Encore: Have you played it with other orchestras? Rodriguez: Yes. The first time I played it with orchestra was in October 2005 with the Jacksonville Symphony. I was practicing, getting better and better. I contacted the composer and obtained the music, so I started practicing it. I approached the conductor of the Jacksonville Symphony, Fabio Mechetti. Weeks went by and one day he said, “I listened to the piece. I’m thinking of programming it.” He did. It was scheduled for the next season. That was the first time I actually played it. Then I went to Brazil to play it with the same conductor. I also played it at the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival in July 2014. The last time I played it was in March 2016 with the Chicago Sinfonietta, the group that actually commissioned the concerto. Encore: Do you play maracas much in other music? Rodriguez: I grew up in Venezuela, where maracas are part of the culture, almost like
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