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With his trademark charismatic energy and elegance Andrés Orozco-Estrada has quickly established himself amongst the top league of international conductors, inspiring musicians and audiences alike.

Andrés Orozco-Estrada has been appointed Music Director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and will start his artistic collaboration at the beginning of the 2026/27 season.

Since autumn 2025, he has held the position of General Music Director of the City of Cologne and Gürzenich Kapellmeister. In his inaugural season he is focusing on the orchestra’s Romantic tradition – in the course of its history the orchestra has given many important world premieres of works by Brahms, Mahler and Richard Strauss.

At the Cologne Opera he will be conducting performances of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, among other works. At the same time he is continuing his work with the Kronberg Academy and helping to promote the careers of young and talented musicians in Cologne through an international competition for composers.

Since the start of the 2023/24 season Andrés Orozco-Estrada has been Principal Conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nationale della RAI in Turin and will be touring Spain with them in November 2025.

During the next season, his engagements will take him beyond Cologne and Turin to concert halls all over the world, where he will be working with many eminent international artists.

Andrés Orozco-Estrada made his Tanglewood Festival debut this summer and returned to the Lucerne Festival. He was also Artist in Residence at the Rheingau Music Festival, where he presented three different programmes.

Other guest appearances during the season include concerts with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He will additionally be conducting the New Year’s Eve Concert with the Dresden Staatskapelle, which will be broadcast live on German television.

Andrés Orozco-Estrada was Music Director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra between 2014 and 2022, Principal Conductor of the hr (Hesse Radio) Symphony Orchestra from 2014 to 2021 and Principal Conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra from 2020 to 2022.

Among the international opera houses where he has appeared are the Vienna, Berlin and Dresden State Operas and La Scala, Milan, while the leading orchestras that he has conducted include the Berlin, Vienna, London and New York Philharmonics as well as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and, in Asia, the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic.

Andrés Orozco-Estrada was born in Medellín in Colombia and began studying the violin in his early youth, switching to conducting at the age of fifteen. In 1997 he began a course of study at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, where he has been professor of orchestral conducting since 2022.

Violinist Tessa Lark is one of the most captivating artistic voices of our time, consistently praised by critics and audiences for her astounding range of sounds, technical agility, and musical elegance. Increasingly in demand in the classical realm, in 2020 she was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category. She is also a highly acclaimed fiddler in the tradition of her native Kentucky, delighting audiences with programming that includes Appalachian and bluegrass music, and inspiring composers to write for her.  

In addition to her performance schedule, Tessa is the newly minted Artistic Director of the Moab Music Festival. She also continues her work as Artistic Director of Musical Masterworks, a chamber music series in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Her summer of 2025 included performances with the Sarasota Festival, Britt Festival, Princeton Festival, Napa Valley Festival, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Music Society SummerFest, and Moab Music Festival.  

Tessa’s 25-26 season features a new concerto written for her by Lisa Biewala.  The premiere with The Louisville Orchestra takes place in October 2025 and will be repeated the following month with Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Other highlights of Lark’s 2025-26 season include returns to the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach, Pasadena Symphony, Tucson Symphony, and Lexington Philharmonic. In recital, she will debut with the Da Camera Society of Texas and return to The Cliburn, and Sunriver Music Festival, Oregon. She reprises Michael Torke’s violin concerto, Sky – written for her, and the 2020 recording of which earned her a Grammy nomination – with the San Antonio Philharmonic.  

As a chamber musician, she will tour with her string trio project with composer-bassist Edgar Meyer and cellist Joshua Roman to venues including the Alabama School of Fine Arts; Shriver Hall, Baltimore; 92NY in New York City; Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara; and Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon.

Tessa has performed with orchestras, recital venues and festivals around the world. She has appeared with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; BBC Symphony Orchestra; the Stuttgart Philharmonic and the Indianapolis, Knoxville and Seattle Symphonies; as well as being presented by Carnegie Hall, New York’s Lincoln Center, London’s Wigmore Hall and Barbican Hall, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Cal Performances, San Francisco Performances, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, Australia’s Musica Viva Festival, and the Marlboro, Mostly Mozart, and Bridgehampton summer festivals.  

Tessa’s most recent album, The Stradgrass Sessions, released in spring 2023, features an all-star roster of collaborators and composers including Edgar Meyer, pianist Jon Batiste, mandolinist Sierra Hull and fiddler Michael Cleveland. The album’s selections mix original compositions by Lark and her collaborators with a sonata by Eugène Ysaÿe, a selection of Bartók violin duets arranged for violin and mandolin and the world premiere recording of John Corigliano’s STOMP.

Tessa’s debut commercial recording was the Grammy-nominated Sky, a bluegrass-inspired violin concerto written for her by Michael Torke and performed with the Albany Symphony Orchestra.  Her discography also includes Fantasy on First Hand Records: Fantasias by Schubert, Telemann and Fritz Kreisler; Ravel’s Tzigane; and Lark’s own composition Appalachian Fantasy.  Other releases include Invention, an album for the violin-bass duo made up of Lark and bassist Michael Thurber which comprises arrangements of Two-Part Inventions by J. S. Bach along with original compositions by both duo partners.  A live performance recording of Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires was also released in 2021 by the Buffalo Philharmonic in honour of Piazzolla’s centenary.

Lark is a recipient of the Hunt Family Award, one of the Lincoln Center’s prestigious Emerging Artist Awards, as well as a 2018 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant. She was Silver Medalist in the 9th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis and winner of the 2012 Naumburg International Violin Competition. She is a graduate of New England Conservatory and completed her Artist Diploma at The Juilliard School, where she studied with Sylvia Rosenberg, Ida Kavafian, and Daniel Phillips. Her primary mentors include Cathy McGlasson, Kurt Sassmannshaus, Miriam Fried, and Lucy Chapman. She plays a ca. 1600 G.P. Maggini violin on loan from an anonymous donor through the Stradivari Society of Chicago.