Fiesta is devoted to Latino concert music and presents artistically significant compositions from Latin America, Spain and Portugal to listeners. The creative force behind this series is Elbio Barilari, an acclaimed composer, musician, performer and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Uruguayan-born Barilari says, "Fiesta features the hottest Latin-American music from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries."
Ricardo Castro Mexican, Composer and Pioneer: Ricardo Castro was a late nineteenth-century romantic composer and pianist, who toured and taught from New York to Leipzig. We will feature his piano concerto and cello concerto, the first written in Latin America.
18th Century Latino Jewels: Colonial Latin American music is one of the hidden treasures of classical music. Today Fiesta shares powerful and beautiful music from Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico, written during the baroque and classical periods.