The El Paso Symphony Orchestra opens its 96th season this Friday and Saturday with a concert built entirely around Mexico, pairing landmark orchestral works with a wall of photography captured across 18 Mexican states. Mágico – The Magic of Mexico takes the stage at the Plaza Theatre on September 18 and 19 at 7:30 p.m., timed to the week of Mexican Independence Day and Hispanic Heritage Month.
According to KVIA, the program is dedicated to Mexico and highlights photography captured by multimedia artist Nicholas Bardonnay, whose images will be projected on a large digital screen above the orchestra as it performs. The visuals come from Westwater Arts, a company that specializes in what it calls symphonic photochoreography, cueing live slideshows to match an orchestra's performance in real time. Bardonnay spent a year living in Mexico to build the project, establishing home bases in Guanajuato, Mérida, and Mexico City and completing three months of Spanish immersion classes before setting out to photograph subjects ranging from 16th-century colonial towns to snowcapped volcanoes and local cultural festivals.
A Program Rooted in Mexican Classical Music
The musical program is anchored by Arturo Márquez's Danzón No. 2, a 1994 composition commissioned by the National Autonomous University of Mexico that is widely regarded as a cornerstone of Mexican classical music and is frequently described as the country's second national anthem, according to Classicalexburns. Márquez drew on the ballroom dancing tradition of Veracruz for the piece.
The concert also includes José Pablo Moncayo's Tierra de Temporal, which the composer wrote in 1949 for a national competition marking the centenary of Frédéric Chopin's death, taking first prize before later providing the score for Guillermo Arriaga's 1953 ballet Zapata, per the Orquesta Filarmónica de la Ciudad de México. The piece is associated with Guillermo Arriaga's 1953 ballet Zapata. Mágico itself is not new to American concert halls: the production originally premiered in 2018 during a Dallas Symphony Orchestra performance co-hosted by the Mexican Consulate, before being adopted by orchestral companies across the country, Westwater Arts notes.
Conducting a 96-Year-Old Legacy
Leading the performance is Bohuslav Rattay, the Czech-born conductor who has served as EPSO's music director since May 2013 and who trained at the Prague Conservatory and Rice University, according to the Texas State Historical Association. Rattay also concurrently serves as music director of Michigan's Midland Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra he leads into its 96th season traces its origins to Frederich R. Koch's organization of the orchestra in 1893; the Symphony Society was established in 1929, with a debut concert held in January 1931 at the Scottish Rite Auditorium. Local musicians had made earlier attempts to form a permanent symphony in El Paso as far back as 1893.
Beyond the classical masterworks series that Mágico opens, EPSO also runs the Young People's Concerts program, established in 1941, which performed for 11,000 El Paso-area fifth graders in a partnership with Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute, as Hoodline previously reported. Over its 85-year history, that free concert initiative has reached approximately 636,000 local students across the borderland.
Inside a Restored Downtown Landmark
The concert unfolds inside the Plaza Theatre, the venue for both performances.
EPSO is scheduling Mágico for September 18-19.
Tickets and Pricing
Tickets for both performances are on sale now, with prices set at $49, $44, $37, $23, and $17 plus fees. Student tickets cost $9, and patrons can add an additional ticket option for $12 plus fees. Tickets are available through epso.org and Ticketmaster.com, or by calling the EPSO office at 915-532-3776.
