With its continuing focus on youth this season, 17-year-old Ilyich Rivas, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s BSO-Peabody Bruno Walter assistant conductor, will make his subscription concert debut at the Music Center at Strathmore.
Rivas will command the podium, presenting an ambitious evening’s repertoire that showcases Brahms’ “Academic Festival Overture,” Mahler’s “Blumine,” the Shostakovich Symphony No. 1 and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Prodigy Markus Groh will perform on piano.
Ambitious and motivated, Rivas, who began conducting at an early age under his father’s tutelage, wants only to engage in this single discipline and carry it on to the best of his ability.
“I feel very comfortable with the program; they are all pieces I’ve lived a long time with,” the native Venezuelan said. “The challenge for me is always to find meaning behind what is there because music presents human emotions so purely.”
Rivas says he can naturally relate to the Shostakovich 1st Symphony, written in 1924 when the composer was an 18-year-old student, presenting the work as a piece judged for graduation. Like Rivas, who was selected to participate in the Cabrillo Festival Conductors Workshop, and who made a significant impression on director Marin Alsop, Shostakovich himself astounded and impressed established music professionals.
“I can think about my time now, my present, and imagine where he was,” Rivas said. “But it’s sort of a double-edged sword because at the same time, it is a very mature piece, very serious.”
And so Rivas approaches the piece like any other, aiming to bring out its maturity and depth, that intuition being a large part of his studies at the Peabody Institute under the guidance of Gustav Meier, as well as working with Alsop and the BSO.
So far, teachers, critics and audiences are impressed.
“Ilyich has received a lot of attention for conducting a major symphony orchestra at such a young age,” Matt Spivey, BSO manager of artistic operations, said. “But this goes beyond the novelty of having a teenager conduct the BSO. Rather, here is an exceptional musician poised to lead powerful performances of masterpieces by Beethoven and Shostakovich. Ilyich is at the cusp of an extremely promising career.”
