Pablo Herrero Pondal is an orchestra conductor born in Buenos Aires, who began his training in orchestral conducting under the guidance of David del Pino Klinge, from 1994 to 1999, and continued his further studies in Santiago, Chile.
In June 2006, he debuted in the season of the Georgian National Orchestra (Tbilisi) and in the “Season of Discovery” of the Chilean Symphony Orchestra. She won Second Prize in the III “Simón Blech” International Competition (2006), held in Bahía Blanca, in tribute to the outstanding Argentine musician.
He conducted on several occasions the Symphony Orchestra of the National University of Cuyo, and the symphony orchestras of San Juan, Tucumán, Neuquén, Rosario, and the National Symphony of Bolivia. He has been director of the Youth Orchestra of the Faculty of Arts of the National University of Cuyo. He directed the operas Suor Angelica, by G. Puccini (2002) and I Pagliacci, by R. Leoncavallo (2003). He also, by Donizzeti, Elixir d’amore (2009) and, by Mozart, The Magic Flute (2010).
He worked with soloists such as Horacio Lavandera, Bruno Gelber, Vladimir Tsypin, Xavier Inchausti, Eliana Bayon, Luis Lima, Luis Gaeta and Verónica Cangemi, among others. He currently directs our Mendoza Philharmonic Orchestra.
ROBERTO URBAY
The renowned pianist achieved the title of Master of Fine Arts, specialized in concert pianist, piano teacher and konzertmeister at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, one of the highest houses of musical study in the world.
Among his teachers were Margot Rojas, Alexander Lambert, Silvio Rodríguez Cárdenas, Evgeny Mogilevsky, Harold Gramatges and Juan Piñera.
In 1973, he was winner of the Uneac Prize (National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba) and, in 1977, of the Special Prize in Chamber Music, in the Young Performers’ Tribune at the Interpodium Festival in Bratislava.
His interpretive art has been valued in Belgium, Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, Spain, Albania, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Korea, Japan, the United States of America, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and Cuba.
The works of George Gershwin
Cuban Overture
The first work that Gershwin composed under the influence of his teacher Schillinger was the Cuban Overture, whose initial title was Rumba. As Rumba, it premiered in August 1932, at Gershwin’s first all-performance concert at New York’s Lewisohn Stadium before a crowd of 18,000. “It was,” Gershwin later said, “the most exciting night I ever had.”
Gershwin prepared a brief analysis of Rumba, saying: “The composition was inspired by a brief visit to Havana and I strove to combine Cuban rhythms with my original thematic material. The result is a symphonic overture that embodies the essence of Cuban dance.” On the cover it indicated that the performers of the four Cuban instruments – harpsichords, maracas, guiro and bongos – had to be placed right in front of the conductor’s lectern.
Had Gershwin lived longer than his allotted 38 years, the Cuban Overture might have become a signpost on the path to a highly advanced compositional style. The piece is both characteristic of Gershwin and Gershwin in transit. No one who listens to it will doubt who the author is, but it is evident that the familiar traces, the contagious rhythms, this time rumba and the distinctive melodic blues chords are guided by a hand considerably more sophisticated and cultured than the one that had recorded the first symphonic-jazz works.
An American in Paris
It was on a trip abroad that inspired Gershwin to work seriously on a commission he had recently received from the New York Philharmonic. His idea for the new work was solidified while he was purchasing Parisian taxi horns to take to the United States: to capture the tumult of the streets of Paris in music and create a concert work that did not center on piano.
Back in New York, Gershwin finished An American in Paris, which he subtitled A Tone Poem for Orchestra. An American in Paris was a great success with the public – and with Hollywood – and established Gershwin as an original voice in concert halls around the world, a voice that resonates to this day.
PIANO CONCERT IN F
In 1925, in addition to continuing to satisfy a large audience clamoring for more of his sweet, tender, buoyant, boisterous songs that they could sing, whistle, and hum, George Gershwin made another foray into the classics. This, the Concerto in F for piano and orchestra, was an even more ambitious undertaking than the previous year’s Rhapsody in Blue. A full-fledged concerto in three movements and a completely Gershwin work, down to his own orchestration.
Those who thought that the super composer had detoxified himself from “serious” music were somewhat wrong. Although the phenomenally talented and successful composer devoted himself seriously to the serious musical forms of the concert, the symphonic poem (American in Paris), and the opera (Porgy and Bess), he did not change his musical personality for the concert hall: there was no split personality for Gershwin. While most American composers of his time, many of them with a traditional training much more developed than his, wrote in the fashionable European styles, Gershwin cultivated his mother tongue, the only truly original American vernacular: jazz. .
