MUSIC

Presented by the Consulate General of Mexico, the Consulate General of France and the Texan-French Alliance for the Arts, two dynamic and internationally renowned soloists--French flutist Jean Ferrandis and Mexican pianist Mauricio Nader--will be featured in a gala concert at 7 PM on Thursday evening, March 18 at the University of St. Thomas' Jones Hall.

Their performance is encompassed within the "Houston Celebrates Mexico 2010" series of events celebrating Mexico's Bicentennial, and also within the French Cultures Festival, which will be held around the same date. The event is free and open to the public.

This concert will offer an attractive blend of national musical styles, including iconic sonatas by Mexican composer Samuel Zyman, French composer César Franck, and Austrian composer Franz Schubert. Also on the program are Gustavo Morales’ Rapsodia Mexicana No. 1 for piano solo, Charles Lefebvre’s Barcarolle, and a virtuosic fantasy on Verdi’s La Traviata by Italian composer Giulio Briccialdi.

This musical event represents a first-time collaboration between the Consulates General of Mexico and France in Houston, and also involves the Texan-French Alliance for the Arts. Most importantly, it will showcase the exciting first-time collaboration of two world-class artists, one Mexican and one French.

The Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bank of America, the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of St. Thomas, the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, and LITERAL - Latin American Voices magazine - are also among the sponsors.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Jean Ferrandis (picture #2 below) French soloist and conductor Jean Ferrandis enjoys an international career that takes him throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. He has presented recitals, performed chamber music, and appeared as soloist with orchestra in such prestigious concert halls as Alice Tully Hall, the Salle Pleyel and Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, the Taipei Arts Center, Wigmore Hall in London, La Fenice in Venice, Hamarikyu Hall in Tokyo, the Vigado in Budapest, the Palau de la Musica Catalana in Barcelona, and the Moscow Tschaikovsky Conservatory. He has been invited to numerous festivals, including the Lanaudière in Canada, Switzerland’s Sion Festival, the Budapest Spring Festival, the Midem Festival in Cannes, and the Berlioz Festival in Lyon. His chamber music collaborators have included Gidon Kremer, Ivry Gitlis, Jean Philippe Collard, and Emile Naoumoff.

His appearances at the 2006 National Flute Association convention in Pittsburgh included a gala headliner concert in Heinz Hall and a master class. Jean Ferrandis is professor of flute at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He regularly presents master classes in Japan, the United States, and Korea, and this fall also appeared in Taiwan and South Africa. This will be his second visit to Houston As a conductor he leads the St. Petersburg Camerata in Russia and the St. Christopher Chamber Orchestra in Vilnius, Lithuania, with which he has recorded flute concertos of C.P.E. Bach. His other recordings include Mozart’s complete flute concertos (with Marie-Pierre Langlamet, solo harpist of the Berlin Philharmonic), works of Honegger and d’Indy, Schubert’s sonatinas and the “Arpeggione” sonata, and a two-disc set of works for flute by Yuko Uebayashi.

Jean Ferrandis received his first prize from the Lyon Conservatoire, where he studied with Maxence Larrieu. A prize winner at such as international competitions as Munich, Maria Canals in Barcelona, and Young Concert Artists in New York, he was awarded the grand prize at the 1986 Prague Spring Festival International Flute Competition. Leonard Bernstein was so impressed by his performance of the adagio from Mozart’s D major concerto that he remarked “It is Pan himself!” and subsequently composed a cadenza for Mr. Ferrandis.

Mauricio Náder (picture #1 below) Born in Mexico City, Mexican pianist Mauricio Náder began performing at the age of nine years old and has maintained an active career, having performed over 600 concerts to date. Since his recital appearances in Spain through the Prince of Asturias Foundation (1994), he has performed extensively in Mexico, the United States, Canada, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Belize, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Lebanon and Pakistan. Recently he was selected to perform for President Felipe Calderón, the Prince of Asturias Felipe de Borbón (2008) and for the President of France Nicolas Sarkozy (2009) during their official visits to Mexico. Mauricio Náder, a 1991 graduate of the University of Houston, debuted as a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra (Mexico) at the age of nineteen.

Since then, he has been invited by all of Mexico's major orchestras, as well as by diverse orchestras of Europe, the American continent and the Middle East, working with important Mexican and foreign conductors. His interpretative warmth, the power of his artistic personality and his ability to face an immense repertory ranging from the Baroque to the contemporary music have led him to become one of today's Latin American musicians who most hold the attention of the organizers of festivals and orchestras of Mexico and abroad. Mr. Náder's work can be appreciated in over twenty compact discs, which exemplify his natural ability to appear as a soloist, in chamber music and as a vocal accompanist.

In 2008 Mauricio Náder received a "Most Distinguished" mention at the Ibla Grand Prize-World Music Competition (Italy) and the First Prize at the Piano Biennial (Mexico); in 1996 he obtained the First Prize at the "Bartók-Kabalevsky" International Piano Competition (USA) and the same year he received the Commemorative Medal of the Austrian Millennium. He has also received fellowships from the National Fund for Culture and the Art under the category of "performers with an outstanding career," and his face appears, along with some of the most outstanding Mexican artists of the 20th century, on the commemorative stamp entitled "México del Siglo XX al Tercer Milenio/Arte" (Mexico in the Twentieth Century, at the turn of the Third Millennium/Art) issued by the Mexican Postal Service in 2000.

He is Academic Director/Piano Professor at the Mexican Center of Graduate Studies in Music, in Puebla, Mexico. At present he is a member of the Ensamble 3, a leading Mexican trio devoted to contemporary music.