Miguel Ángel Gómez-Martínez, former director of the RTVE orchestra and choir, dies | Culture

The conductor and composer Miguel Ángel Gómez-Martínez, former director of the RTVE Symphony Orchestra and Choir, has died in Málaga at the age of 74, the public broadcaster announced on Monday. “The corporation remembers his great professional figure in two outstanding periods (1984-1987 and 2016-2019) and expresses its deepest condolences to family and friends,” it says in the statement. a press release.

Born in Granada on 17 September 1949 to a family of musicians, he learned to play the piano and violin at a very young age and to compose in his hometown of Madrid and in the United States. At the age of 13 he already held the title of piano teacher at the Granada Conservatory. And at 21 he was the youngest graduate in the history of the Conducting course in Vienna, where he was an outstanding student of the historic conductor Hans Swarowski. During his stay in Austria he received the Extraordinary Prize from the Ministry of Science. His first performance as a conductor was in 1973 in Vienna and he later directed the most prestigious symphony and philharmonic orchestras in the world over five decades, such as those of Vienna, Berlin, London, Hamburg (appointed as honorary conductor in perpetuity), Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Osaka, Oslo, Copenhagen and Cameristi della Scala (Milan).

In 1985 he was appointed artistic director of the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid, a position he would hold until 1991, and which forced him to leave the direction of the RTVE Orchestra, to which he would return after almost 30 years. In Spain, where he would make his first appearance as a conductor in 1975 within the framework of the Granada Music and Dance Festival, he would also occupy the position of director of the Euskadi Symphony Orchestra and the Valencia Orchestra.

His other facet, along with that of director, was that of composer. Among his works are the Symphony of discovery, Symphony of water, Five tributes in four movements (Symphony No. 3), A Spanish Requiemthe opera Atallahseveral concertos for piano, violin, flute and various chamber works. He has received numerous awards, such as the Gold Medal of the City of Granada “for his extraordinary artistic merits”, the Medal of Honor of the cities of Bonn, Madrid, Munich, Hamburg, Bern, Mannheim, Houston and the state of Bavaria, among others, as well as the Encomienda de Número of the Order of Civil Merit, awarded by the King of Spain. He has also received distinctions for his recordings for the labels Decca, Orfeo, RCA, Bongiovanni, Teldec, Sony, Dabringhaus and Grimm, Naxos, Hispavox, Ondine.

The Gómez-Martínez International Foundation The organization created with his wife, Alessandra Ruiz-Zúñiga Macías, will take on the future task of maintaining and disseminating his musical legacy. The funeral ceremony and burial of Miguel Ángel Gómez-Martínez will take place in his native Granada in the coming days.