Concertgebouworkest YOUNG

© Daniela Steinmacher

Originally from Colombia, the conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada is at home on all the world’s major concert stages. He has conducted the Berlin and the Vienna Philharmonic, the great orchestras in Amsterdam, London and Paris, in Chicago and Philadelphia, as well as the Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic. In the summer of 2021 he concluded his seven years as the chief conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, with which he recorded works by Wagner, Strauss and Stravinsky, among others. From 2014 to 2022 he was also music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. Orozco-Estrada has also made a name for himself as an opera conductor; thus he returns to Berlin’s State Opera Unter den Linden this spring for a series of performances of La Traviata, following Puccini’s Tosca in February 2022. Together with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, whose chief conductor the 45-year-old was from 2020 to 2022, he most recently performed Catalani’s opera La Wally at the Theater an der Wien. Orozco-Estrada also lives in Vienna, where he was appointed professor of conducting at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts in October 2022.

© Tam Lan Truong

It was not only by winning the Yehudi Menuhin Competition in 2021, where she was awarded the First Prize, the Audience Prize and the loan of a Stradivari violin, that María Dueñas catapulted herself into the first league of highly promising young violinists. In 2018 she won the International Violin Competition Vladimir Spivakov; in 2021 this was followed by first prizes at the “Getting to Carnegie” Competition and the International Violin Competition Victor Tretyakov. Born in 2022 in Granada, Spain, the 12-year-old won a scholarship to the Dresden Music Academy; later she studied with Boris Kushnir in Vienna. In July 2022, María Dueñas was the soloist in the summer concert of the Staatskapelle Berlin; during this season she has performed with the Orchestre de Paris under Paavo Järvi, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra under Gustavo Gimeno. In the spring of 2023 the violinist’s first CD will be released on Deutsche Grammophon, on which she plays Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with her own cadenzas.

© Harry Rafique

Carlijn Metselaar (b. 1989) is a Dutch composer currently living in Edinburgh. She is especially interested in creative collaboration and has worked with choreographers, directors, librettists and visual artists. In 2017, Carlijn Metselaar completed a postgraduate degree in composition with distinction at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, studying with Lynne Plowman. She graduated from Utrecht Conservatoire with a Bachelor in Composition, and from Utrecht University with a Master of Musicology, including a music education qualification. Carlijn Metselaar has taught music privately and in secondary schools in the Netherlands and in the UK. She also studied choral conducting as a one-year course at the Utrecht Conservatoire. She is currently doing a PhD in composition at Cardiff University, supported by a Young Talent Award (Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Netherlands) and a Cardiff University School of Music scholarship.

www.carlijnmetselaar.com