HOUSTON, TX (July 19, 2023) — The Houston Symphony has announced the winner of its Assistant Conductor audition: Chilean conductor Gonzalo Farias. Farias has previously held the positions of Associate Conductor of the Kansas City Symphony, Associate Conductor of the Jacksonville Symphony, and Assistant Conductor of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. He begins his Houston Symphony post with the start of the 2023–24 Season in September, acting as assistant to Music Director Juraj Valčuha. His duties include conducting the orchestra in various programs including Education, Family, Community, and Summer concerts, as well as covering for guest conductors.
Farias was recently selected to conduct at the esteemed Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview, the most important showcase for conductors in America. Designed by the League of American Orchestras, the National Conductor Preview chooses the most promising talents in the world for their podium gift and commitment to the future of American orchestras. Farias was also appointed by the National Endowment for the Arts as a reviewing member for the Grant for Art Projects, judging applications from diverse music institutions to support the latest and most important artistic endeavors in the United States.
Additionally, Farias was the recipient of the prestigious Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conducting Fellowship for two seasons. Mentored by Marin Alsop, he assisted leading conductors Robert Spano, Bernard Labadie, Markus Stenz, Christoph König, Johannes Debus, and Lahav Shani among others; he has worked with instrumentalists like Hélène Grimaud, Vadim Gluzman, Johannes Moser, André Watts, and composers Christopher Theofinadis, Anna Clyne, Jonathan Leshnoff, and Christopher Rouse, among many others. As former Music Director of the Joliet Symphony Orchestra, Farias engaged with the Hispanic residents of Joliet and the greater Chicago area with pre-concert lectures, Latin-based repertoire, and a unique side-by-side bilingual narration of Bizet’s Carmen.
During the summers, Farias has worked with Jaap Van Zweden and Johannes Schlaefli at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival in Switzerland as well as with Neeme and Paavo Järvi at the Pärnu Music Festival. In the United States, he was a two-time recipient of the prestigious Bruno Walter Memorial Conducting Scholarship at the Cabrillo Music Festival and named “Emergent Conductor” by Victor Yampolsky at the Peninsula Music Festival. He also attended the Pierre Monteux Festival where he received the Bernard Osher Scholar Prize. Out of 566 applicants and 78 countries, he was chosen as one of 24 finalists in the prestigious 2018 Malko Conducting Competition with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. Hailed by the Gramophone magazine critics, Farias offered one of the “most fluent, honest, open-hearted and pointed performances”.
Farias was born in Santiago de Chile, where he began his piano studies at age five. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the P.C. University of Chile and then continued his graduate piano studies at the New England Conservatory as a full-scholarship student of Wha-Kyung Byun and Russell Sherman. He has won first prize at the Claudio Arrau International Piano Competition and prizes at the Maria Canals and Luis Sigall Piano Competitions. As a conductor, Farias attended the University of Illinois working with Donald Schleicher, the Peabody Conservatory with Marin Alsop, and worked privately with Larry Rachleff and the late Otto-Werner Mueller.
Besides having a fond love for piano, chamber, and contemporary music, Farias is a passionate supporter of second-order cybernetics as a way to help understand communication and how complex systems organize, coordinate and interconnect with one another. This includes the interdependent and recursive nature of musical experiences, in which performers and audiences alike interact and respond to each other. His final Doctoral thesis, “Logical Predictions and Cybernetics,” explores the case of Cornelius Cardew’s “The Great Learning” to redefine music activity as a self-organized organization. In addition to that, he has a warm affection for Zen Buddhism, which has been a major influence on his approach to music and life.
About Houston Symphony
Under Music Director Juraj Vačuha, the Houston Symphony continues its second century as one of America’s leading orchestras with a full complement of concert, community, education, touring, and recording activities. One of the oldest performing arts organizations in Texas, the Symphony held its inaugural performance at The Majestic Theater in downtown Houston on June 21, 1913. Today, with an operating budget of $34.325 million (FY23), the full-time ensemble of professional musicians presents more than 130 concerts annually, making it the largest performing arts organization in Houston. Traditionally, musicians of the orchestra and the Symphony’s two Community-Embedded Musicians also offer over 1,000 community-based performances each year at various schools, community centers, hospitals, and churches reaching more than 200,000 people in Greater Houston annually.
After suspending concert activities in March 2020, the Symphony successfully completed a full 2020–21 season with in-person audiences and weekly livestreams of each performance, making it one of the only orchestras in the world to do so, while the Symphony’s Education and Community Engagement team continued to fulfill its mission through creative and virtual means throughout the COVID pandemic. The Houston Symphony remains committed to livestreaming all of its 2023–24 season to a broad audience in over forty-five countries and all fifty states, one of few American orchestras dedicated to transmitting live performances to a size-able audience outside its home city through this technology.
The Grammy Award-winning Houston Symphony has recorded under various prestigious labels, including Koch International Classics, Naxos, RCA Red Seal, Telarc, Virgin Classics, and, most recently, Dutch recording label Pentatone. In 2017, the Houston Symphony was awarded an ECHO Klassik award for the live recording of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck under the direction of former Music Director Hans Graf. The orchestra earned its first Grammy nomination and Grammy Award at the 60th annual ceremony for the same recording in the Best Opera Recording category.
