Born in Spain, Gustavo Gimeno landed on my “watch list” for upcoming conductors in 2022 when he led the LA Phil in a concert that featured orchestral music by his young countryman Francisco Coll. The only student of Thomas Ades, Coll’s guitar concerto Turia would be featured in Jacaranda’s 2023 belated birthday tribute to his teacher and close friend of the series. At WDCH, Gimeno also conducted the “Egyptian” Piano Concerto of Saint-Saëns, another personal favorite, and the mighty Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. In every work the conductor of the Toronto Symphony and Luxembourg Philharmonic showed extraordinary prowess and authority. Gimeno’s Shostakovich left me, and three companions, shaken and profoundly moved—the audience went bananas!

The upcoming program is certain to be revealing of this super-gifted conductor’s way with Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto, the First Symphony of Sibelius, and Hungary’s modern master György Ligeti (best known for his music in 2001: A Space Odyssey). The Ligeti is an early work—a four-movement mini-concerto for orchestra—from 1951, long before his trademark “far-out” sound textures. The Concert Românesc is witty, irrepressible, and a little bit subversive, with quite a surprising “wait-for-it” ending. The tremendously gifted Capuçon brothers from France are always welcome here as concerto soloists. Violinist Reynaud will bring to Mozart, his “velvety tone and...a high degree of elegance” – Los Angeles Times. Sibelius’s First Symphony established him as an incontestably great master of the form, and it remains a prismatic transmitter of the conductors’ special command of Finnish atmosphere and Nordic power.