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HOUSTON, TX (April XX, 2024) — The Houston Symphony invites the whole family to become immersed in magic through the enchanting world of Disney’s Encanto in Concert Live to Film at Jones Hall April 20-21. The Academy Award®-winning film comes to life like never before as the orchestra, under the direction of Houston Symphony Assistant Conductor Gonzalo Farias, performs the original score by Academy Award-nominated composer Germaine Franco and original songs by Tony Award® and GRAMMY®-winning composer Lin-Manuel Miranda. Nestled in the mountains of Colombia, follow the captivating tale of Mirabel Madrigal, a spirited teenage girl grappling with her identity as the sole child in her family without the gift of magic. Renowned for her Grammy-winning and Oscar®-nominated compositions, Germaine Franco has carved an illustrious path marked by innovation and excellence, shattering barriers as the first Latina to clinch a Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media with her remarkable work on Encanto. Her accolades for Encanto include an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, an SCL Award for Outstanding Original Score for a Studio Film, an Annie Award for Best Music in a Feature, a Billboard Music Award, and a World Soundtrack Awards nomination for Film Composer of the Year in 2022.
Multi-award-winning songwriter, actor, producer, and director Lin-Manuel Miranda is best known for his groundbreaking work on Broadway’s Hamilton and In the Heights, as well as his work on animated features including Moana and Vivo. Miranda wrote several original songs for Encanto and was awarded Best Song Written for Visual Media for the Latin-inspired song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” Throughout his career, he has been honored with a Pulitzer Prize, Grammy Awards, Emmy® Awards, and Tony Awards, and has been recognized by the MacArthur Foundation and the Kennedy Center Honors.
Guests are welcome to take photos with their favorite costumed characters in the lobby. Kids ages 6-12 are eligible to save 25% on tickets in price levels three and four with the purchase of at least one adult ticket. For tickets and more information, call or text 713.224.7575, or visit houstonsymphony.org/encanto.
HOUSTON SYMPHONY PRESENTS DISNEY’S ENCANTO IN CONCERT LIVE TO FILM
Presentation licensed by Disney Concerts.
Saturday, April 20, 2024 at 6:30 p.m.
Sunday, April 21, 2024 at 2:30 p.m.
Jones Hall for the Performing Arts
Gonzalo Farias, conductor
About Gonzalo Farias
An engaging orchestral conductor, award-winning pianist, and passionate educator, Gonzalo Farias is the Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony. In an ever-changing world, Gonzalo desires to establish music-making as a way of rethinking our place in society by cultivating respect, trust, and cooperation among all people in our community.
Gonzalo previously served as associate conductor of the Kansas City Symphony, associate conductor of the Jacksonville Symphony, assistant conductor of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and conducting fellow at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Praised for his “clear, engaging” style “with a lyrical, almost Zen-like quality,” Gonzalo has been established “as a focused, musical artist who knows what he wants and how to get it—with grace and substance.” As former music director of the Joliet Symphony Orchestra, he embraced the city of Joliet and its Hispanic residents of the greater Chicago area with pre-concert lectures, Latin-based repertoire, and a unique side-by-side bilingual narration of Bizet’s Carmen.
Gonzalo 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. He 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.
During the summers, Gonzalo 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 from 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 the “most fluent, honest, open-hearted and pointed performances.”
Gonzalo 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 won first prize at the Claudio Arrau International Piano Competition and prizes at the Maria Canals and Luis Sigall Piano Competitions. As a conductor, he attended the University of Illinois working with Donald Schleicher, the Peabody Conservatory with Marin Alsop, and worked privately with Larry Rachleff and Otto-Werner Mueller.
Besides having a fond love for piano, chamber, and contemporary music, Gonzalo is a passionate supporter of second-order cybernetics 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, respond, and co-create each other’s space. 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, he has a warm affection for his formal studies of Zen Buddhism, which has been a major influence on his approach to music and life.
About Houston Symphony
Under Music Director Juraj Valčuha, 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 $37.8 million, 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 three 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. The Houston Symphony remains committed to livestreaming 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 G nomination and Grammy Award at the 60th annual ceremony for the same recording in the Best Opera Recording category. The Symphony’s most recent recordings include a Pentatone release in January 2022 of its world premiere performances of Jimmy López Bellido’s Aurora and Ad Astra, and a Naxos release in July 2023 of its world premiere performance of Jennifer Higdon’s Duo Duel.
