Meet Gonzalo Farias
Gonzalo Farias, Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony, is an imaginative and engaging orchestral leader, award-winning pianist, and dedicated educator. Praised for his “clear, engaging style with a lyrical, almost Zen-like quality,” he is recognized as “a focused, musical artist who knows what he wants and how to get it—with grace and substance.”
He has held conducting posts with the Kansas City Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. As Music Director of the Joliet Symphony Orchestra, he strengthened community connections through innovative programming, pre-concert lectures, and bilingual collaborations, including a narrated performance of Bizet’s Carmen.
Recent and upcoming appearances include the Nashville Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Buffalo Philharmonic, Tallahassee Symphony, and the Houston Symphony, where in 2024 he conducted the world premiere of Arturo Márquez’s Guitar Concerto with Pablo Sainz-Villegas.
He was one of six conductors chosen for the prestigious Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview, presented by the League of American Orchestras, and was appointed by the National Endowment for the Arts as a grant review panelist.
Born in Santiago de Chile, Farias began piano studies at age five. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and continued his education at the New England Conservatory, studying under Wha-Kyung Byun and Russell Sherman. He has won prizes at the Claudio Arrau International Piano Competition, Maria Canals, and Luis Sigall competitions. His conducting mentors include Donald Schleicher, Marin Alsop, Larry Rachleff, and Otto-Werner Mueller.
Beyond performance, Farias is committed to reimagining music as a force for personal growth, dialogue, cooperation, and community-building. His doctoral dissertation, Logical Predictions and Cybernetics, examines Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning to explore music-making as a self-organizing system. Influenced by Zen Buddhist practice and second-order cybernetics, he views music as a shared space where performers and audiences co-create meaning, reflecting on our shared human condition.
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I’m thrilled to be joining you next January for a program called Chasing Dreams.
We open with a piece about dreams of freedom, wide open spaces, ranches, and the excitement of being a cowboy. As a fellow Texas resident myself, I know you will love John Williams’ The Cowboys: Overture as much as I do.
The next two works feature our wonderful soloist, Paul Aguilar, performing on both the violin and viola. On the violin, we will hear three pieces from Schindler’s List by John Williams, and you may know the famous theme, but you experience all three movements arranged for the concert hall. And then on the viola part, he will perform a visionary concerto by Christian Colberg, a work that Paul has championed for many years now. It will truly be a dream.
We will close with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a journey from struggle and fate to one of the most triumphant endings in all music. Talk about chasing a dream there! So, I hope you will join us to experience and to dream together. I look forward to seeing you very soon.”
–Gonzalo Farias
