Jorge Martinez-Rios

Jorge Martinez-Rios is a conductor appearing with the Las Cruces Symphony Orchestra in two 2026-27 subscription programs. The concerts pair core Romantic-era repertoire with a contemporary crossover set built around Max Richter's reworking of Vivaldi. Listeners can expect a season that moves from stormy overture and concerto drama to a quieter, minimalist-inflected program.

The November program opens with Beethoven's Egmont overture, a compact, dramatic curtain-raiser built on sudden shifts from tension to triumph, written originally to accompany a play about resistance to tyranny. It continues with Mendelssohn's "Scottish" Symphony, a work full of misty, folk-tinged melodies said to be inspired by his trip to Scotland, and closes with Bruch's First Violin Concerto, one of the most lyrical and immediately singable works in the violin repertoire. The February program shifts mood entirely: Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" is a slow, repeating string piece often used in films for its meditative sadness, followed by his "Four Seasons Recomposed," which takes Vivaldi's familiar concertos and loops and reshapes their patterns into something both nostalgic and new, before Britten's brisk, youthful Simple Symphony closes the evening.