Jorge Federico Osorio
Piano
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Jorge Federico Osorio has been lauded throughout the world for his superb musicianship, powerful technique, vibrant imagination, and deep passion. He is the recipient of several international prizes and awards, including the prestigious Medalla Bellas Artes, the highest honor granted by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts.
Osorio has performed with many of the world’s leading ensembles, including the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico; the Israel, Warsaw, and Royal Philharmonics; RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Dublin), Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai (Torino), São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), Moscow State Orchestra, Orchestre Nationale de France, Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has collaborated with such distinguished conductors as Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, James Conlon, Bernard Haitink, Manfred Honeck, Mariss Jansons, Lorin Maazel, Juanjo Mena, Jorge Mester, Carlos Miguel Prieto, Robert Spano, Klaus Tennstedt, and Jaap van Zweden, among many others. His concert tours have taken him to Asia, North, Central and South America, and Europe, where he has performed in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Dublin, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Stuttgart, and Torino.
Osorio has recently given recitals in Los Angeles (The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts); Mexico City and Xalapa, Mexico; Aix en Provence, France; Highland Park, Illinois (Ravinia Festival); San José, Costa Rica; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Other recitals during the past few seasons have taken place in Berkeley, California (Cal Performances), Boston, and Chicago, where he has appeared on Symphony Center’s distinguished Piano Series on four separate occasions. He has also given two recitals in New York City at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, both of which were highly acclaimed by Allan Kozinn of The New York Times. North American festival appearances have included the Hollywood Bowl, Mainly Mozart, Bard, Newport, Grant Park, and Ravinia, where he performed all five Beethoven Concerti with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Conlon in two consecutive evenings.
A prolific recording artist, Osorio has documented a wide variety of repertoire, including a solo Brahms CD that Gramophone proclaimed “one of the most distinguished discs of Brahms’ piano music in recent years.” Orchestral recordings include Beethoven’s five Piano Concertos and Choral Fantasy; both Brahms Concertos; and concertos by Chávez, Mozart, Ponce, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Rodrigo, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Weinberg. Osorio’s acclaimed solo recordings on Cedille Records include Final Thoughts – The Last Piano Works of Schubert & Brahms; Russian Recital with compositions by Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich; Salón Mexicano, comprising music of Mexican composers Manuel M. Ponce, Felipe Villanueva, Ricardo Castro, and José Rolon; an entire disc devoted to music of Ponce; a 2-CD set of Debussy and Liszt; and Piano Español, a collection of works by Albéniz, Falla, Granados, and Soler that received glowing reviews internationally and marked Osorio as one of the world’s great interpreters of Spanish piano music. In addition to Cedille, Osorio’s recorded work may be found on the Artek, ASV, CBS, EMI, IMP, and Naxos labels.
An avid chamber music performer, Osorio has served as artistic director of the Brahms Chamber Music Festival in Mexico; performed in a piano trio with violinist Mayumi Fujikawa and cellist Richard Markson; and collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Ani Kavafian, Elmar Oliveira, Henryk Szeryng, and the Pacifica and Moscow Quartets. He began studying the piano at the age of five with his mother, Luz María Puente, and later attended the conservatories of Mexico, Paris, and Moscow, where he worked with Bernard Flavigny, Monique Haas, and Jacob Milstein. He also studied with Nadia Reisenberg and Wilhelm Kempff. Highly revered in his native Mexico, Osorio resides in the Chicagoland area, where he serves on the faculty at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts.
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ROBERT SPANO MAKES A SPLENDID DEBUT AS THE FORT WORTH SYMPHONY’S NEW MUSIC DIRECTOR
“After intermission, pianist Jorge Federico Osorio served up the freshest Beethoven Emperor Concerto in memory. Defying auto-pilot norms, Osorio favored a subtly nuanced, sometimes almost improvisatory approach.”
– Scott Cantrell, The Dallas Morning NewsA HOLIDAY TREAT: JORGE FEDERICO OSORIO’S PIANO RECITAL
“Osorio displays a degree of authority and scholarship that comes only with a lifetime of musicmaking.”
– Howard Reich, Chicago TribuneCLASSICAL CANDOR REVIEWS THE FRENCH ALBUM
“he plays with beauty and charm, a delicate touch, and a genuine grace, with expressive, nuanced singing in his piano playing.”
– John J. Puccio, Classical CandorGRAMOPHONE REVIEWS THE FRENCH ALBUM
“Elegant, yes, and whose playing has a warmth and humanity that I found immensely appealing…These will leave you in no doubt that you are listening to a master colourist.”
– Jeremy Nicholas, GramophoneCLASSICAL MUSIC SENTINEL REVIEWS OSORIO’S THE FRENCH ALBUM
He allows each note to bask in the afterglow of its own resonance…everything seems to glow with energy from within.
–Classical Music SentinelATLANTA SYMPHONY, PIANIST JORGE ORSORIO PUT ON A RIVETING PERFORMANCE
Jorge Osorio showed why he has quickly become an audience favorite at Symphony Hall.Mexican pianist Jorge Federico Osorio played his part with nuance and soloistic precision, conjuring up a specific sense of place, the Moorish gardens at Generalife. Together, he and the orchestra executed that first serpentine melody creating a mystical atmosphere. In gentler moments the ensemble overshadowed Osorio’s elegant playing, but not enough to obscure his clearly delineated phrasing and Spanish characterization of the music. The third movement, “En los jardines de la Sierra de Córdoba” began like a flash of lightning, immediately subsiding to a crystalline melody played by Orsorio in octaves at the high end of the keyboard. The energy of the piece was just right throughout, an exotic vitality bubbling just beneath the surface.
– Stephanie Adrian, ARTS ATLATLANTA SYMPHONY GETS COLORFUL IN MUSIC BY AUZNIEKS, FALLA AND PROKOFIEV
In Thursday’s concert, Osario played Manuel de Falla’s Noches en los jardines de España (“Nights in the Gardens of Spain”), a set of three musical impressions inspired by gardens near the Alhambra, a ninth-century Moorish palace and fortress complex built on the remains of Roman fortifications in Granada, a province of Andalusia in southern Spain. Falla lived in Granada from 1921 to 1939, but he wrote Noches before that period, originally intending it to be a set of nocturnes for solo piano when he began work on it in 1909, but completing it as a work for piano obbligato and orchestra in 1915.The piano solo part is the preeminent instrument of the overall ensemble but far more integrated into it than would typically be the case in a concerto. As he did in his 2016 performance of Brahms’ first piano concerto with the ASO, Osorio drew from the piano an overall aura of elegance, while pushing the instrument’s power only where truly necessary, focusing on details of phrasing and expression rather than a show of bravura – the dominant color in the overall palette.
– Mark Gresham, EarRelevantPIANIST JORGE OSORIO GOES FROM PINCH-HITTER TO FEATURED GUEST PERFORMER WITH THE ASO
I first heard Jorge Federico Osorio with an American orchestra in Chicago in 2013 when he interpreted Mexican composer Carlos Chávez’ rarely performed Piano Concerto, a tour de force for the keyboard. It was a brilliant, blazing performance of one of the most technically difficult piano scores I have ever heard.
– Janet Crane, ARTS ATLASO WELCOMES PIANIST JORGE FEDERICO OSORIO
Pianist Jorge Federico Osorio has been featured frequently at Symphony Hall; his 2018 performances of the complete Beethoven piano concertos were highlights of the season.
– Jon Ross, The Atlanta-Journal ConstitutionPLAYING AT ITS HIGHEST LEVEL, SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY BRINGS AUDIENCE TO ITS FEET
“Pianist Osorio… became a giant at the keyboard. To say this was immaculate playing that plumbed the deepest level of understanding would be an understatement.But Osorio transcended mere brilliance in his encore: Brahms’ Op. 118 A-minor Intermezzo. Stupendous is a big word for something of such modest size, but this was the real thing. Osorio makes the kind of art we need every day of our lives. May his return be announced soon.”
– Marcus Overton, The San Diego Union TribuneREVIEW: FOR MEXICAN PIANIST JORGE FEDERICO OSORIO, A BETTER-LATE-THAN-NEVER RECITAL DEBUT
– Rick Schultz, Los Angeles TimesABBADO AND OSORIO CREATE A MASTERFUL BEETHOVEN
“The standout performance of the evening was the Beethoven piano concerto, due primarily to the great partnership between Osorio and Abbado, as well as the soloist’s highly skilled and sensitive performance. Mr. Osorio has been a most welcome soloist over the last few weeks in Atlanta.”
– William E. Ford, BacktrackRETURNING TO NEW YORK, FORCEFULLY
“Three Soler sonatas established several of Mr. Osario’s strengths at the outset. Not least among them are a bright but warm tone, the technique and finger power required for Soler’s rapid-fire repeating notes, and the elegance to illuminate the exotic Classicism that drives these works and is their link to Scarlatti on one hand, and Mozart on the other.”
– Allan Kozinn, The New York Times -
Orchestral Repertoire
Aranda
Concerto No. 2 for piano and orchestraBeethoven
Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op.15
Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op.19
Concerto No. 3 in c minor, Op.37
Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op.58
Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, “Emperor," Op.73
Choral Fantasy
Triple Concerto in C Major, Op. 56Brahms
Concerto No. 1 in d minor, Op. 15
Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 83Chavez
Concerto for piano and orchestraCastro
Concerto for piano and orchestraManuel de Falla
Nights in the Gardens of Spain, G. 49Franck
Symphonic VariationsGershwin
Rhapsody in BlueGinastera
Piano concerto No. 1Grieg
Concerto in a minor, Op. 16Liszt
Concerto No. 2
Totentanz (Dance of Death), S. 126, R. 457Mendelssohn
Double concerto for violin and pianoMozart
Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, KV. 271
Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major, K. 449
Concerto No. 19 in F Major, KV 459
Concerto No. 21 in C Major, KV 467
Concerto No. 23 in A Major, KV 488
Concerto No. 24 in c minor, KV 491
Concerto No. 25 in C Major, KV 505
Concerto for 2 Pianos in E-flat Major, KV 365 (2nd Piano)Poulenc
Aubade, Concerto for piano and 18 instrumentsPonce, Manuel M.
Concierto románticoProkofiev
Concerto No. 1 in D-Flat Major, Op. 10Rachmaninov
Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini, Op.43Ravel
Concerto for the Left HandSchumann
Concerto in a minor, Op. 54Shostakovich
Concerto No. 2Tchaikovsky
Concerto No. 1, Op. 23*Updated August 2022