José Luis Gomez this weekend will step back from the Tucson Symphony Orchestra podium and pick up his violin to make his Tucson solo debut.
“I’m very excited,” Gomez, who is in his third season as the TSO’s music director, said, then chuckled. “The word solo debut is too big for what I am going to do.”
For the first time since joining the TSO, the Venezuela-born Spanish conductor will join the string section to perform Mozart’s Serenade No. 6 for Strings in D major “Serenata notturna.”
It’s a piece that spotlights a singular violin voice in snippets, which technically makes Gomez’s point that he won’t truly be performing a “solo.” The piece also calls on a second solo violin voice, which he is tasking to Concertmaster Lauren Roth.
“Gomez Plays Mozart” will, though, mark the first time we’ve seen Gomez perform on the violin that launched his career when he was a kid growing up in Venezuela. Gomez was a product of Venezuela’s prestigious El Sistema program whose luminaries include LA Phil Conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
He put down his violin nearly a decade ago and took up conducting.
For this weekend’s TSO MasterWorks concert, he will put in double-duty, playing with the orchestra in the concert’s first half and conducting in the second.
“This is the cool part. It would be so easy to say I can play a concerto and the orchestra will accompany me. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to do a work that would include myself playing whenever the composer is asking for a solo, but more kind of a chamber music setting,” said Gomez, 40. “That is something that I think would be great for people to see, that I come from a background of playing in an orchestra, a background of enjoying music from the inside.”
Gomez, whose TSO contract last month was extended to 2024, admitted that sitting among the musicians as an equal strengthens the bond that he has formed with the ensemble from the first time he led them in 2014 as a music director candidate.
“The communication is very easy with them,” he said. “That makes a difference for an orchestra this size and for a town like this. Tucson brings a lot of this energy. It’s not business-related; it’s about human feelings.”
The orchestra will perform “Gomez Plays Mozart” on three days — Friday, March 8; Saturday, March 9; and Sunday, March 10.
