Utah Arts Review – Conductor Enrique Mazzola is passionate about bringing classical music to new audiences

by Wynne Delacoma

For the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, conductor Enrique Mazzola was as frantic about the future as most of us.

“In March of last year,” he said, “when the cancellations started, of course, I had a feeling of frustration. After a couple of months, this sense of frustration became a reaction, a very beautiful artists’s reaction. We have to do something. We must react. We have to make music. Let’s make music. And from then on, I never stopped making music.”

Mazzola, the new music director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, will make his Utah Symphony debut this weekend leading the orchestra in Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, Verdi’s Overture to La forza del destino and Nino Rota’s Suite from La strada.

In late summer 2020, Mazzola was riding out the pandemic in his home in Montepulciano, Italy, a hill town in southern Tuscany. The pandemic was momentarily easing in Europe. He was able to travel for live performances at the Bregenz Festival in Austria and Zurich Opera in Switzerland. Over the ensuing months, he added scattered dates for virtual concerts with the Detroit Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the Dutch National Opera and a master class at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. In August he conducted live performances of Verdi’s Luisa Miller at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. Everywhere he went, Covid-19 restrictions were seriously enforced.

Read more at utahartsreview.com