Andrés Orozco-Estrada’s first concert on the podium of the Rai National Symphony Orchestra after his appointment as chief conductor of the team: an appointment proposed by Rai Cultura on Friday, December 1, at 9:15 p.m. on Rai 5. Andrés Orozco-Estrada, born in Medellín in Colombia in 1977, made his debut with the Rai Orchestra in May 2022 and in October of this year he began a three-year collaboration that will take him to the Rai podium several times during the season and on tour. He led ensembles such as the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Houston Symphony. From the 2025/2026 season he will be general music director of the city of Cologne and will take over the management of the Gürzenich Orchestra and the opera in the German city, one of the most important European cultural metropolises. He regularly conducts orchestras such as the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and the Concertgebouw Amsterdam.
At the opening, Orozco-Estrada offers the famous Symphony No. 41 in C major KV 551 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, known as “Jupiter”. The piece was composed during a difficult time for the Austrian musician, marked by economic, emotional and psychological uncertainties. Characterized by a grandiose and Olympian tone, it completes the cycle of his last three symphonies, written in just three months between June and August 1788.
The second part presents “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky, proposed in the orchestration created by Maurice Ravel in 1922. In 1874, a visit to the posthumous drawing exhibition of his friend, the architect Viktor Hartmann, provided Mussorgsky with the inspiration for a suite of imaginative piano pieces, which, between one promenade and the other in the exhibition rooms, describes ten paintings behind which just as many states of mind are hidden. Ravel, who had a great attraction for Russian music and especially the music of Mussorgsky, was so fascinated by the charm of the images that he created an orchestral version that became famous for its richness of color.
