Robert Treviño leads the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra at Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas in 2020. Photo by Lawrence Jenkins/Dallas Morning News.
In Monday’s (11/4) New York Times, David Allen writes, “Robert Treviño, a Mexican American conductor who has been the music director of the Basque National Orchestra in San Sebastián, Spain, since 2017 … has drawn acclaim in the past several years for recordings that are carefully prepared, exquisitely rendered and attentively controlled without ever sounding at all cautious…. I have particularly admired remarkably sensitive Respighi with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, of which Treviño is currently the principal guest conductor, and a frankly gorgeous survey of Bruch with the Bamberg Symphony on CPO. Most intriguing, and perhaps most revealing of Treviño himself, are ‘Americascapes,’ a pair of bold releases of American music with his Basque ensemble. The first volume smartly explores works by Charles Martin Loeffler, Carl Ruggles, Howard Hanson and Henry Cowell. The second, which was released last Friday, begins with George Walker and ends with Silvestre Revueltas. Treviño: ‘Once I started becoming a professional musician, I came very quickly into contact with the idea that the art form is an elitist art form, for the wealthy, and a small, select group of people. I never understood this, because I don’t come from that. What we perform is the musical representation of human existence and the human condition, and in that, like Maya Angelou said, anything that is human cannot be foreign to me, because I am human.’ ”
