Bohuslav Rattay

Bohuslav Rattay is a conductor appearing across the El Paso Symphony Orchestra's upcoming season, leading programs that range from Mozart and Rimsky-Korsakov to Mahler, Ravel, Brahms, and American orchestral works. Listeners in El Paso will have several chances across the season to hear his approach to a wide variety of orchestral repertoire, from opera overtures to full symphonies.

Across this season's concerts, expect a broad sampling of orchestral color. The Mexico-themed program pairs Mozart's overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio with Moncayo's Tierra de temporal and Márquez's Danzón No. 2, both built on dance rhythms from Mexican popular music, before closing with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, a work that uses a solo violin to represent a storyteller across four vividly orchestrated movements. Later programs turn to Strauss's tone poem Till Eulenspiegel, full of trombone glissandos and mock-heroic brass outbursts, paired with Mahler's Fourth Symphony, which ends with a soprano singing a child's vision of heaven. Other concerts bring Ravel's slow-building Boléro, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in its orchestral dress, Brahms's tightly argued Fourth Symphony, and Gershwin's jazz-inflected Rhapsody in Blue. A listener can expect a season built around contrast, folk-inflected color set against large-scale symphonic architecture.