VICENTE CHAVARRIA

- LA BRUJA -

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Conductor and composer VICENTE CHAVARRIA is a native of Miami, Florida. He served for four years as Artistic Director of Fra Angelico Chamber Choir and the Sibelius Camerata at the University of Miami, leading performances of Latin American Baroque music, Ramírez's Misa Criolla, Mozart’s Requiem, and the Miami premiere of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (concert version), among others. He also served as Artistic Director of Amazonia Vocal Ensemble, touring Southwest Florida and Puerto Rico. While at the University of Miami, he conducted the premiere of a short work by James Progris with the UM-Frost Symphony Orchestra and served as cover conductor for the Schumann Chamber Orchestra and the Existential Orchestra. He made his international conducting debut in September 2008 with the Sinfonia Bucharest in Romania, conducting Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Haydn. As a conductor, he has prepared ensembles for Alberto Grau, Scott Seaton, Cristian Grases, and Ruben Valenzuela. He currently serves as Artistic Director of the early music ensemble Flos Campi in Los Angeles (currently in its third season), the newly-formed Baroque ensemble La Monarca, and Director of the Gloria Dei Choir in La Habra, California. He recently premiered works by composers David Asher Brown and Jeffrey Parola with different ensembles in Los Angeles, and prepared a program of 15th-century English carols in a collaborative performance for the Getty Museum.

Mr. Chavarria has composed and arranged music for several artists and ensembles, including the GRAMMY-award winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer (after being declared co-winner of the Chanticleer Composer Competition in 2006), flutist Sir James Galway, soprano Helen Donath, and various ensembles at the University of Miami, the University of Southern California, and Clemson University. The UM-Frost Chorale performed his compositions and arrangements on tour in Ecuador in 2008 and again in Spain in 2011. He has also written incidental music for two short plays by Drew Larimore, which were premiered in New York. His choral arrangements are published by Santa Barbara Music Publishing.

Mr. Chavarria holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Miami. He specializes in Latin American Baroque and Spanish Renaissance music, and presented papers on these topics at conferences at the University of California-Santa Barbara and CENIDIM, the Mexican national music research institute in Mexico City. Throughout his Master’s degree in Musicology, as Graduate Teaching Assistant, he taught a freshman course in Introductory Musicology at the University of Miami; he also founded the annual Musicology Student Conference at the Frost School and served as its first Program Committee Chair. He is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Early Music Performance at the University of Southern California-Thornton School of Music, studying with Adam Knight Gilbert, Rotem Gilbert, and Jason Yoshida, as well as composition with Morten Lauridsen; he has also studied Choral Music and Spanish Linguistics at USC. He has performed with Bach-Collegium San Diego, LASchola, the USC Baroque Sinfonia, USC Collegium Workshop, USC Chamber Singers, and Compline Scholars, and has guest conducted the San Gabriel Valley Choral Company. He has performed on tours throughout the US, Ecuador, Spain, New Zealand, and Australia. He has performed in masterclasses with Trudy Kane, Andreas Scholl, Rodney Eichenberger, Xavier Díaz-Latorre, and the Hilliard Ensemble. Memberships include ASCAP and Early Music America.