The United States/Mexico Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, comprising musicians from El Paso Symphony Youth Orchestras and Mexico’s Orquesta Sinfónica Azteca Ciudad Juárez, debuted January 28 at El Paso’s Plaza Theatre. Led by EPSYO Music Director James O. Welsch, the program of Verdi, Gershwin, and Mexican composer Samuel Zyman was repeated the next day at the Teatro Victor Hugo Rascón Banda in Juárez. A few weeks later, EPSYO’s parent organization, the El Paso Symphony Orchestra, looked south with a pair of “Copland in Mexico” concerts (Rodeo and El Salón México, Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá and his score to Redes performed to a screening of that 1935 Mexican film), as part of “Music Unwound,” an educational project with the University of Texas-El Paso and a local high school. Produced by Joseph Horowitz for a consortium of orchestras, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Music Unwound” will be reprised next season at the Las Vegas Philharmonic and South Dakota Symphony Orchestra.
