For ten years, José Luis Gómez has stood on the Tucson Symphony Orchestra's podium and built programs the way a conductor is supposed to: balanced, varied, careful. This month he finally let himself do the thing he had been circling for a decade. "Latin Sizzle," the third installment of the orchestra's inaugural ¡Fiesta Latina! series, is the first all-Venezuelan concert Gómez has programmed since he became music director in 2016 — Venezuelan soloists, Venezuelan composers, and a Venezuelan folk instrument at the front of a symphony hall.
"This hits home and hits home with a home run for sure," Gómez told the Arizona Daily Star, choosing his words with the slight caution of a man who does not want to be accused of playing favorites.
The caution is understandable. Gómez was born in Maracaibo, the son of a Spanish flutist, Eulogio Gómez, who emigrated to Venezuela in 1958 and helped found the Maracaibo Symphony Orchestra. He grew up inside that orchestra's world, and inside El Sistema, Venezuela's national music-education network that has sent an extraordinary generation of conductors into the world's concert halls. He came to Tucson in 2016, succeeding George Hanson, and has spent his tenure arguing — quietly, through programming — that the distance between a Venezuelan joropo and a Finnish symphony is shorter than the concert calendar usually suggests.
¡Fiesta Latina! is the festival-sized version of an idea the orchestra has been developing since the pandemic. Gómez calls it ¡Celebración Latina!, an initiative to "expand the repertoire of the orchestra towards Hispanic representation throughout the whole season" — not a single token concert in September but repertoire and artists threaded through every kind of program the TSO plays. The October festival, the orchestra's first, stretches across four concerts: Spanish guitarist Rafael Aguirre opened it on Oct. 10 with Joaquín Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez"; violinist Jesús Linárez, who spent one season as TSO concertmaster before leaving last summer, returned to play a chamber program with his former colleagues. It closes Nov. 1 with the orchestra's Día de los Muertos concert.
"Latin Sizzle" is the heart of it, and the reason is the guest list. Jorge Glem is, in Gómez's phrase, "an important figure of Venezuelan culture" — the ambassador of the cuatro venezolano, the four-stringed instrument that looks like a small guitar or a large ukulele and sounds like neither. Higher than a guitar, lower than a ukulele, with a warm, resonant middle, the cuatro is the engine of Venezuelan rhythm. "It is very complex because it is used to define all those very complex rhythms that we have in Venezuela," Gómez said, pointing to the joropo, the fast, waltz-like dance the cuatro drives.
Glem, who is from Cumaná and now lives in the United States, is a Latin Grammy winner and Grammy nominee who has made it his life's work to carry the cuatro into rooms it has never been. He is a founding member of C4 Trio, which won a Latin Grammy for the album "Tiempo al Tiempo" with salsa singer Luis Enrique. He has played with Paquito D'Rivera, Rubén Blades, Carlos Vives, Natalia Lafourcade and Jon Batiste, and in September 2022 he joined Batiste's ensemble for the sold-out "American Symphony" concert at Carnegie Hall. He has soloed with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela at the Edinburgh International Festival, with the San Francisco Symphony, and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, and last year he made his official New York Philharmonic debut with Dudamel across four of the city's five boroughs.
At the center of his Tucson program is the piece that has become his calling card: Gonzalo Grau's "Odisea: Concerto for Venezuelan Cuatro and Orchestra." The LA Phil commissioned it and Dudamel led the world premiere, with Glem as soloist; the recording, made with Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony for the orchestra's 50th-anniversary album "Odyssey," earned Grau a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Classical Composition. It is a concerto written to show what the cuatro can do when it is handed an orchestra rather than a dance floor.
Beside Glem stands Elvis Martínez, playing the bajo — the Mexican guitar that is everywhere in regional Mexican, Norteño and Tejano music. The pairing is deliberate: two folk traditions, two instruments that carry a culture's rhythm, sharing a stage with a symphony orchestra.
The first half rounds out with two landmarks of the Venezuelan repertoire. Inocente Carreño's "Margariteña" is a symphonic poem from 1954, a tribute to the composer's birthplace, Margarita Island, built on popular tunes and spirited Venezuelan rhythms — it premiered at the First Latin American Music Festival in Caracas that December. Aldemaro Romero's "Fuga con Pajarillo," a movement from his Suite No. 1 for Strings, does something almost cheeky: it takes the pajarillo, one of Venezuela's most famous dances, and folds it into a strict fugue. Dudamel has described the pajarillo as a waltz with the accent on the weak beat — "not 'one two three, one two three,' but 'one two three, one two three. It's not a comfortable dance!" — and the tension between that loose, improvisatory feel and the predetermined fugal form is exactly the point. It is also, fittingly, the piece Dudamel brought to the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg in 2004, the competition he won.
Then comes the anchor, and it is not Venezuelan at all. Jean Sibelius's Symphony No. 5, the Finnish composer's most beloved orchestral work, closes the program. Gómez is working his way through the full Sibelius cycle, but he refuses to box the symphonies in with other Nordic composers or on programs of nothing but symphonic repertoire. "What if we use the power and the energy of folk music from Venezuela and connect it with that same thematic that we have with Sibelius, especially Sibelius' Fifth Symphony, which depicts Finlandia," he said. Gómez grew up listening to Sibelius and Shostakovich alongside Venezuelan waltzes and folk tunes, and he sees the pairing as a chance "to unite the two worlds of folk music in one concert instead of just separating them."
That is the argument of the whole evening, stated plainly: that the folk music of Venezuela and the symphonic canon are not two separate rooms. "The aim is obviously to showcase our Hispanic heritage with this kind of thematics," Gómez said. "But then my intention is very purposeful to say that we are not that far away when it comes to all the music that we're familiar with in the orchestral repertoire."
"Latin Sizzle" is performed at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 23, at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave. Tickets run $21.05 to $115.48 through tucsonsymphony.org. Each performance is preceded by Concert Comments, a pre-concert talk beginning one hour before the downbeat, and the hall enforces a clear-bag policy. The ¡Celebración Latina! initiative is underwritten by the I. Michael and Beth Kasser Family Foundation.