Chavez: Piano Concerto Jorge Federico Osorio

• 1 I. Largo non troppo - Allegro agitato 20:17
• 2 II. Molto lento 09:11
• 3 III. Finale - Allegro non troppo 07:05
• 4 Meditacion 05:10
• 5 Muros verdes 06:36
• 6 Variations on an Original Theme 16:13
• Total Runtime 01:04:32

Info zu Chavez: Piano Concerto

Rarely heard in concert or on disc, 20th-century Mexican composer Carlos Chávez’s spectacular Piano Concerto, completed in 1940, receives an insightful and compelling performance from Mexican-born pianist Jorge Federico Osorio, with his native country’s flagship orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfónica Nacional de Mexico and its music director, the dynamic young conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto.

For performers and audiences alike, Chávez’s powerful Piano Concerto is a thrill ride of surprising tempo changes amid a whirlwind of styles. Legendary pianist Eugene List, who gave its world premiere in New York in 1942, marveled at its “immense rhythmic complexity, great technical difficulty and unrelenting thrust and pressure.” Reviewing the premiere, The New York Times called the work “imaginatively scored” and praised its “elemental strength and the originality of its orchestral coloring.”

Chávez (1899–1978) wrote “extraordinarily varied works of Mexican character,” notes Grove Music Online. In addition to Chávez’s epic concerto, Osorio plays three works for solo piano on the new CD: Chávez’s early Meditación; Mexican nationalist composer José Pablo Moncayo’s Muros Verdes (Green Walls), from 1951; and contemporary Mexican-born American composer Samuel Zyman’s Variations on an Original Theme (2010)

'Osorio is a piano virtuoso of international fame, and in my experience he has never demonstrated anything but sensitive, immaculate, committed, passionate playing in his work. It was a pleasure listening to him on the Cedille disc, and even though I had never heard any of the music before, he made it appear vibrant and entertaining.

Although I had no other recording of the Concerto with which to compare this one, I can’t imagine another surpassing Osorio’s way with it. His playing is full of intense, nervous energy, which no doubt the Chavez work requires.

What we get here is an abundance of sharp contrasts and vibrant rhythms, with a good deal of percussion and flute backing up Osorio’s piano.' (John J. Puccio, Classical Candor)

Jorge Federico Osorio, piano
Mexico National Symphony Orchestra
Carlos Miguel Prieto, conductor

Jorge Federico Osorio
has been internationally acclaimed for his superb musicianship, powerful technique, vibrant imagination, and deep passion, and hailed as “one of the more elegant and accomplished pianists on the planet” (Los Angeles Times). He has performed with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Symphony Orchestras of Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México; the Israel, Warsaw, and Royal Philharmonics; the Moscow State Orchestra, Orchestre Nationale de France, Philharmonia Orchestra, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. Osorio’s concert tours have taken him to Europe; Asia; and North, Central, and South America. He has collaborated with such distinguished conductors as Bernard Haitink, Mariss Jansons, Lorin Maazel, Klaus Tennstedt, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, James Conlon, Luis Herrera, Manfred Honeck, Eduardo Mata, Juanjo Mena, Michel Plasson, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Maximiano Valdés, and Jaap van Zweden, among many others. American festival appearances have included the Hollywood Bowl, Ravinia, Newport, and Grant Park Festivals. One of the highlights of Osorio’s long and distinguished career was the performance of all five Beethoven Concertos over two consecutive nights with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the 2010 Ravinia Festival. During the past several years, Osorio has performed in Berlin, Brussels, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart; at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; and at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Recent American recitals have taken him to Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Chicago, where he performed on the prestigious Bank of America Great Performers Series at Symphony Center. Osorio has also given two highly acclaimed New York City recitals at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.

A prolific recording artist, Osorio has documented a wide variety of repertoire, including a solo Brahms CD that Gramophone proclaimed “one of the most distinguished discs of Brahms’ piano music in recent years.” Recordings with orchestra include Beethoven’s five Piano Concertos and Choral Fantasy; both Brahms concertos; and concertos by Chávez, Mozart, Ponce, Rachmaninov, Rodrigo, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky. Osorio’s acclaimed solo recordings on Cedille Records include Salón Mexicano, comprising music of Mexican composers Manuel M. Ponce, Filipe Villanueva, Ricardo Castro, and José Rolón; an entire disc devoted to music of Ponce; a 2-CD set of Debussy and Liszt; and Piano Español, a collection of works by Albéniz, Falla, Granados, and Soler that received glowing reviews internationally and marked Osorio as one of the world’s great interpreters of Spanish piano music. Osorio’s recorded work may be found on the Artek, ASV, CBS, Cedille, EMI, IMP, and Naxos labels.

Osorio has won several international prizes and received numerous awards, including the prestigious Medalla Bellas Artes, the highest honor granted by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts; the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Gina Bachauer Award; and First Prize in the Rhode Island International Master Piano Competition. An avid chamber music performer, he has served as artistic director of the Brahms Chamber Music Festival in Mexico; performed in a piano trio with violinist Mayumi Fujikawa and cellist Richard Markson; and collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Ani Kavafian, Elmar Oliveira, and Henryk Szeryng. A dedicated teacher, Osorio serves on the faculty at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts. For his own musical education, Osorio began his studies at the age of five with his mother, Luz María Puente, and later attended the conservatories of Mexico, Paris, and Moscow, where he worked with Bernard Flavigny, Monique Haas, and Jacob Milstein. Osorio’s other mentors include Nadia Reisenberg and Wilhelm Kempff. Highly revered in his native Mexico, where he performs often, Osorio resides in Highland Park, Illinois, and is a Steinway Artist.

Mexico National Symphony Orchestra
Founded in 1928 by composer Carlos Chávez, the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México is the most important musical ensemble in Mexico. The orchestra has won numerous awards, including a 2002 Latin Grammy nomination for Best Classical Album. Its principal conductors have included José Pablo Moncayo, Luis Herrera de la Fuente, Sergio Cárdenas, Francisco Savín, Arturo Diemecke and, since 2007, Carlos Miguel Prieto. Legendary musicians who have conducted the orchestra include Heitor Villa-Lobos, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Krzysztof Penderecki, Otto Klemperer, Pierre Monteux, Sergiu Celibidache, Leonard Bernstein, and Sir Georg Solti. On its most recent tour, under music director Carlos Miguel Prieto, the orchestra played to great acclaim in the most prestigious halls of Europe, including the Tonhalle in Düsseldorf, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, and Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, among others.

Carlos Miguel Prieto
An exciting and insightful communicator renowned for his charismatic presence on the conductor’s podium and his versatile command of various composers and styles, Carlos Miguel Prieto is considered one of the most dynamic young conductors on the classical stage today. Music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería in his native Mexico, and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in the United States, Maestro Prieto was named music director of the YOA Orchestra of the Americas in November 2011. In high demand as a guest conductor, Maestro Prieto’s numerous North American guest conducting credits include the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Toronto, Houston, Indianapolis, Colorado, Vancouver, and San Antonio; the philharmonic orchestras of Florida, New Mexico, Dayton, and Calgary; and every major orchestra in Mexico. He has conducted orchestras throughout Europe, Russia, Israel, and Latin America. Recent debuts abroad include the New Japan Philharmonic in Japan, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra in Germany, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and the Netherlands Radio Orchestra in Utrecht.

Prieto has made a series of recordings of Latin American and Mexican music for the Urtext label. His Naxos recording of Korngold’s Violin Concerto with violinist Philippe Quint and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería received a Grammy nomination. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Universities (where he was concertmaster of the orchestra), Prieto studied conducting with Jorge Mester, Enrique Diemecke, Charles Bruck, and Michael Jinbo.

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