ALONDRA DE LA PARRA, CONDUCTOR

Conductor Alondra de la Parra has gained widespread attention for her spellbinding and vibrant performances, making her one of the most compelling conductors of her generation. She holds the distinction of being the first Mexican woman to conduct in New York City, and is an official Cultural Ambassador for Mexican Tourism. She has been heralded by Plácido Domingo as “an extraordinary conductor.”

“De la Parra's conducting style must be seen to be believed,” raved the San Antonio News Express. “Her electric, precise and energetic fluidity generated arches of breathtaking, glowing expression. The driving Beethoven rhythms pulled the audience to its feet at the end. If people still wore hats, they would have been tossed toward the theater's night-sky ceiling.”

Born in New York City in 1980, De la Parra moved to Mexico with her parents at age two. She began playing the piano at age seven and the cello at 13, and it was that year that she decided she wanted to be a conductor. At 15, she went to boarding school in England to study music and achieved her A-levels there. After returning to Mexico, she studied composition at Centro De Investigación y Estudios Musicales (Center of Music Studies, CIEM) in Mexico City before moving to New York City at age 19, and attending the Manhattan School of Music where she studied piano with Jeffrey Cohen and conducting with Kenneth Kiesler.

Alondra de la Parra founded the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas (POA) in 2004, when she was 23. Her mission was to create an orchestra that would serve as a platform to showcase young performers and composers from the Americas, giving music from the Americas an unquestioned place in the standard orchestral repertoire. POA has been a remarkable success story, and now tours Mexico frequently, presents an annual concert season in New York City, and has its summer home at the Music Festival of the Americas in Stowe, Vermont. In September 2010, De la Parra and POA performed during Mexico’s national celebration of the country’s Bicentennial at the Columna a la Independencia (El Ángel). The celebration was attended by hundreds of thousands and broadcast internationally to an estimated 200 million households around the world.

De la Parra’s debut recording, Mi Alma Mexicana (“My Mexican Soul”) with POA was released by Sony Classical in August 2010. The 2-CD set celebrates the 2010 Mexican Bicentennial with 200 years of Mexican orchestral music, some of it never before commercially available. The disc was among the top 10 on the US Billboard Classical Chart when it was released, and in Mexico earned “Disco de Oro” (Gold Record) status in less than two months – a first for a classical recording in Mexico in more than a decade.

Over just the past five years De la Parra has been featured on NBC’s Today Show, in Crain’s New York Business as one of their “40 under 40 New York’s Rising Stars,” singled out in The Daily Beast as one of the “Young Rockstars of the Conducting World,” graced the cover of Caras magazine, been the subject of a major feature in The New York Times, recognized by Poder magazine as one of their “Top 20 under 40,” and named as one of six “Young Artists on the Rise” in Symphony magazine.

Frequently in demand as a guest conductor, Alondra de la Parra has led the symphony orchestras of Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Phoenix, Columbus, San Antonio, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Miami’s New World Symphony, Canada’s Edmonton Symphony, Germany’s Kammerakademie Potsdam and Moritzburg Festival Orchestra, Denmark’s Tivoli Symphony, the Russian National Orchestra, Brazil’s Sao Paulo Symphony, the Orquesta Sinfónica del Estado de Mexico, Mexico’s Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa and Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, Venezuela’s Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra, the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Aguascalientes, Uruguay’s Montevideo Philharmonic, the Singapore Sun Festival Orchestra where she collaborated with actor Geoffrey Rush, and the Washington National Opera in a gala concert with Plácido Domingo. In addition, since 2005 she has been Music Director of the Music Festival of the Americas in Stowe, Vermont.

Alondra de la Parra makes her home in New York City and holds a B.A. in piano performance and an M.M. in conducting from the Manhattan School of Music. Alondra de la Parra is represented worldwide by Tanja Dorn at IMG Artists. For more information, visit www.alondradelaparra.com. 

JAN LISIECKI, Piano

Already recognized around the world for his poetic and mature playing, Jan Lisiecki has received several awards, including the 2010 Révélations Radio- Canada Musique and the 2011 Jeune Soliste des Radios Francophones. He has recently signed an exclusive recording agreement with Deutsche Grammophon.

Upcoming performance highlights include the 2011/2012 season opening concert of the Orchestre de Paris under Paavo Järvi at Salle Pleyel, and debuts with the BBC Symphony at the Barbican in London, the Leipzig Radio Symphony at Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Göteborgs Symfoniker. European recital debuts include Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt, Gstaad, Hamburg, Lisbon, Vienna, and Zurich. In summer 2010 Jan will appear at various festivals including Verbier, Radio France and Montpellier, la Roque D'Anthéron and Chopin and His Europe, and in the fall, he returns to Japan with recitals in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Recent and upcoming engagements in North America include recitals in Chicago and Seattle, as well as orchestral appearances with the Toronto Symphony under Peter Oundjian and Montreal's Orchestre Métropolitain under its music director, Yannick Nézet- Séguin.

Born in Calgary in 1995 to Polish parents, Jan has played at Carnegie Hall, the Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, Seoul Arts Centre, and Salle Cortot, and has shared the stage with Emanuel Ax, James Ehnes, Yo-Yo Ma, and Pinchas Zukerman. He has performed throughout Canada, in China, England, France, Germany, Guatemala, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, and Scotland. In 2010, Jan was asked to substitute for Nelson Freire in four concerts in France. He opened the Seoul International Music Festival in Korea and performed for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and an audience of 100,000 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

In 2010, the Fryderyk Chopin Institute released Jan's live recordings of both Chopin concertos with Sinfonia Varsovia and Howard Shelley which received the prestigious Diapason Découverte award in May 2010. Diapason describes Jan as "an unmannered virtuoso already with virile and, above all, irresistibly natural playing." The BBC Music Magazine commended "Lisiecki's mature musicality," and his "sensitively distilled" interpretation of the contrasting concerti, played "with sparkling technique as well as idiomatic pathos" noting that "even in a crowded CD catalogue, this refreshingly unhyped debut release is one to celebrate."Also a dedicated performer of chamber music, Jan has collaborated with the New Zealand String Quartet, Quatuor Ébène, and the Penderecki String Quartet, appearing at festivals including Auvers-sur-Oise, Menton, Merano, Seoul, and many others in Canada and the USA.