Sound the Trumpet and Viva Venezuela

Sound the Trumpet and Viva Venezuela learn more about the music

Latin America meets Central Europe in a pair of concerts packed with irresistible pulsating rhythms and big, bold melodies.

And there’s a Venezuelan powerhouse partnership at their heart in the form of multi-award winning Pacho Flores and the Liverpool Philharmonic’s own Domingo Hindoyan.

You can learn more about it in our programme notes which this year are being presented in a new and accessible way.

And in addition, this companion page draws together a range of complementary content which we hope will help shine additional light on the pieces, the people who composed them and the performers bringing them to life here in Hope Street.

Pacho Flores interview

It would be easy to remember 2020 for all the wrong reasons – but there were some memorable highlights too, and the Liverpool debut of Pacho Flores was one of them.

The irrepressible trumpet virtuoso won over the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall audience with his ebullient performance and his on-stage rapport with fellow Venezuelan Domingo Hindoyan – which led them being dubbed the new ‘dream team’.

And now he is back for two more unmissable concerts promising a pair of premieres – Paquito D’Rivera’s Concerto Venezolano for Trumpet and Orchestra, and Flores’ own Cantos y revueltas for trumpet, Venezuelan cuatro and strings.

“It was amazing,” Flores recalls of last January’s performance from his home in Valencia in Spain. “We did the world premiere of Roberto Sierra’s Salseando and Concierto de Otono by Arturo Marquez who is Mexican and is one of the most well-known Latin (American) composers.

What concertgoers may also remember was the huge range of instruments – seven in all – which he played over the course of the evening.

For the past 20 years Flores has collaborated with Stomvi, Spain’s only manufacturers of brass instruments, to create a range for him to play – instruments like a four-valve flugelhorn, more of which later.

Designing his own instruments and performing in concerts across the globe is a far cry from San Cristóbal in mountainous western Venezuela where Francisco ‘Pacho’ Flores was born in 1981.

He was four or five when he first picked up the trumpet, and eight when he began studying with his father Francisco Flores Diaz. By the age of 11 he knew it was what he wanted to do.

A teenage Pacho joined Venezuela’s famous El Sistema music programme where he met a violinist (later conductor) called Domingo Hindoyan.

The two remained friends and finally found the opportunity to work together in October 2010 when they performed the premiere of Efrain Oscher’s Mestizo trumpet concerto with the Venezulan Youth Symphony Orchestra in Caracas.

Flores subsequently moved to Europe to further his career, while Hindoyan was already based in Switzerland. But despite being on the same continent, their busy careers took them in different directions – until last January in Liverpool.

Now they are being reunited again at Hope Street.

The Sound the Trumpet concert will see Flores play the European premiere of D’Rivera’s concerto, a four-way commission of a new work for trumpet which received its world premiere in Mexico before the pandemic. Future performances are planned in San Diego and Bordeaux.

Sunday’s Viva Venezuela concert meanwhile will feature the UK premiere of his own concertante Cantos y revueltas.

Composing is a second career strand for the 40-year-old who started off arranging works for the trumpet which were originally written for other instruments, widening the trumpet’s repertoire in the process.

“Arranging is the first step to understanding music and orchestration,” he says. “And you can include music from the romantic and classical repertoire, but now for the trumpet.”

One piece he has arranged is the prelude of Bach’s Cello Suite No.3 which he plays on the aforementioned four-valve flugelhorn, which “has extra range and gives more possibilities to play music originally written, for example, for the cello.”

From arranging, in recent years he has progressed to composing original work – and not only for trumpet. He’s currently working on a symphonic poem for orchestra.

It’s trumpet (accompanied by cuatro – a stringed instrument related to the guitar) however which Liverpool audiences will hear this time around.

And Flores is looking forward to his return to Hope Street.

“I had an amazing time in Liverpool,” he enthuses. “I love the hall, and I feel part of a family. I can go into the office to say hello to everybody and it’s the only orchestra where I feel that permission to do that.”

Plus of course there’s that ‘dream team’ relationship to nurture with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s new chief conductor.

“Please, write this!” he beams. “I can sign now. Wonderful!”

Listen to Pacho Flores play his Cantos y Revueltas

Castellanos, Piazzolla and Kodály

Composers from Venezuela, Argentina and Hungary harmoniously co-exist on the programme of both Thursday and Sunday concerts.

Evencio Castellanos was born into a musical family (his father was an organist and choirmaster), and the pianist, composer and music professor went on to become one of the most significant Venezuelan composers of the 20th Century.

Listen to his Santa Cruz de Pacairigua, Suite Sinfónica.

The Orchestra is celebrating the centenary of Astor Piazzolla’s birth this season with the Argentinian’s music being found in several different concerts.

Here it’s a musical amuse bouche in his three-minute Revirado for trumpet and orchestra.

And Zoltán Kodály joins compatriot Bela Bartok on the programme of Viva Venezuela on Sunday afternoon.

Kodály, born a year after Bartok, and composed his Dances of Galánta in 1933 to mark the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society. The piece references the structure of a traditional verbunkos – an 18th Century Hungarian dance.

Enjoy a performance of Dances of Galánta.

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