Greetings from the United States in February, 2024!

Greetings from the United States in February, 2024! We are enjoying a mild winter so far, not much snow. Our University classes and orchestra rehearsals have begun already with concerts beginning next week.

I spent the month of December and a week of January back in Buenos Aires, traveling to some areas of Argentina I have never been before: Tandil and seeing some parts of Buenos Aires that were new to me.

This past week was a busy week with me traveling to judge a concerto-competition in Springfield, Missouri with my former student Maestro Christopher Kelts and another former student Maestro Ramiro Miranda from Asuncion, Paraguay also judging. I traveled back to Illinois last weekend to host my own Illinois State University Competition with three (!) former wonderful conducting students, all of whom have gone on to great careers as conductors: Maestros Christopher Kelts, Michael Sundblad and Brian Dollinger.

The day after my January 31 Concerto-Aria Competition was a large orchestra festival I hosted on campus with 7 high schools, 9 orchestras and about 570 Illinois high school string players coming onto the campus. I had the opportunity to work with each of the orchestras and had the assistance of the ISU artist string faculty and a lot of student hosts to assist at the Festival!

We are ready to host two guest conductors coming in this week to work with the ISU Symphony, guest lead my conducting seminar and conduct the ISU Symphony in concert on Valentine’s Eve. Maestro Massimiliano Messieri from San Marino (Italy/Europe) and Maestro Javier Mas from Buenos Aires will conduct the ISU Symphony on February 13 in a Valentine’s Eve-themed music: Music inspired by Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” music by Tschaikovsky, Prokofiev and Bernstein. Additional music from “Phantom of the Opera” and Gardel’s famous tango “Por Una Cabeza”.

My sabbatical from Illinois State University has been approved for fall semester, 2024 (August 2024 – January, 2025.) I will be living and guest-conducting in Buenos Aires and South America during this period, studying more repertoire from Astor Piazzola and Ariel Ramirez.

I will be returning to Argentina in May, 2024 to conduct the Rio Negro Orchestra in Bariloche Province and then on to Europe in June to conduct in San Marino and again at the Guadiagrele, Italy Opera Festival.