Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa

From the state band to the Teatro Lerdo

The orchestra exists because a governor wanted one. Adalberto Tejeda Olivares, in his second term as governor of Veracruz, set up a symphony orchestra in 1929 and staffed it largely from the state band. Its first concert was given on 21 August 1929 at the Teatro Lerdo in Xalapa, with 38 players under the first violin, Juan Lomán y Bueno, who conducted. That date makes it the oldest symphony orchestra in Mexico, and the orchestra still marks it: the second 2026 season opened on 21 August, the anniversary to the day.

The decisive structural change came in 1975, when the ensemble was absorbed into the Universidad Veracruzana. The then rector, Roberto Bravo Garzón, placed the players on academic terms, which converted a state-funded band of musicians into salaried university staff with the institutional backing that implies. Twelve principal conductors had held the post by the orchestra's ninetieth year, among them Francisco Savín, Luis Herrera de la Fuente, Enrique Diemecke and Carlos Miguel Prieto — a list that doubles as a short history of conducting in Mexico.

Casals, Europalia and the tours

Xalapa is a university city of modest size, and the orchestra's reach has always been larger than the city's. In 1959 it hosted the Pablo Casals international cello festival and competition, which brought Casals himself to Veracruz along with Heitor Villa-Lobos and Mstislav Rostropovich — an event the orchestra still treats as the high-water mark of its first half-century.

Foreign travel came later. The orchestra represented Mexico at the Europalia festival in 1993, and in 2004 toured Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany. A visit to Guatemala followed in 2010 and a Brazilian tour in 2016, where its Rio de Janeiro concert was listed among the city's ten best performances of that year. Domestically it plays well beyond its own hall, including at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and in the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City.

A discography of nearly forty records

Few orchestras in Mexico have recorded as much. The catalogue runs to roughly forty LPs and CDs, starting with an INBA/Musart album in 1964 under Francisco Savín that included music by Rodolfo Halffter and Manuel Enríquez. That founding choice — new Mexican orchestral writing rather than imported standards — set a pattern. The Mexican label Urtext Digital Classics subsequently used the orchestra for a substantial run of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican orchestral repertoire, and Urtext also brought in Martín Lebel for a recording of the opera Séneca, o todo nos es ajeno.

Under Lebel the recorded output has moved towards the central European canon as well, including Beethoven's Ninth, Mozart's Requiem and a Beethoven and Schumann album. The orchestra's own history was published as a book by the Universidad Veracruzana in 2022, presented at the Fonoteca Nacional.

Tlaqná, the hall that changed the sound

For decades the orchestra worked out of the Teatro del Estado. On 25 August 2013 it moved into Tlaqná, Centro Cultural, on the university's campus for culture, arts and sport in Xalapa — a purpose-built complex whose main auditorium seats 1,285, with two further concert spaces and an acoustic design project of its own. Having a dedicated room rather than a shared municipal theatre is what makes the current model possible: a weekly Friday series across two long seasons, sold partly by subscription under the Abono OSX scheme, with tickets handled through the orchestra's website, the university shop, the Museo de Antropología shop and the Tlaqná box office on concert nights.

Lebel's second term, and two seasons in one year

The French conductor Martín Lebel, a pianist and cellist who studied fugue, counterpoint, orchestration and conducting at the Paris Conservatoire, took the orchestra over for the 2020 season after eight years under the Brazilian Lanfranco Marcelletti. Lebel had been a guest in Xalapa before the appointment, conducting a schools concert there in October 2019. He had previously been artistic director of the Montevideo Philharmonic until April 2015 and artistic and musical director of the Karlovy Vary Symphony Orchestra from 2009, with conducting prizes from the Mitropoulos competition in 1998 and the Prokofiev competition in 2003. He is now in a second term running to 2027.

The first 2026 season was large and conventionally ambitious: 23 concerts between 16 January and 27 June, all on Fridays at 8pm at Tlaqná, opening with a new year programme that set Mexican waltzes against European repertoire. It took in Beethoven's Ninth, Mendelssohn's Elijah, Stravinsky's Firebird suite, and on 23 January Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony — the first time the orchestra had played it in eight years. Soloists included the violinist Igor Pikayzen, the pianist Jorge Federico Osorio and the soprano Graciela Morales.

Mahler has been the spine of Lebel's programming. The Second Symphony, with the Coro de la Universidad Veracruzana and the mezzo-soprano Harumi Castro, was given on 17 April 2026 and reviewed for Bachtrack by Vishnu Bachani three days later under the heading of a standout Resurrection — a rare instance of international classical press covering a concert in Veracruz.

Season two opened on the 21 August anniversary with the violinist Francisco Fullana, and Lebel has described its shape as deliberately varied: world premieres, seldom-played Mexican works, collaborations with other parts of the university, and repertoire that stretches from the symphonic canon to mariachi. The autumn included the Franco-Hungarian pianist Suzana Bartal in Saint-Saëns' Second Concerto alongside Tchaikovsky's Pathétique on 28 August, a guest programme from David Pérez Olmedo on 4 September, a mariachi night with Fátima Corona on 10 September, schools concerts led by Mariana Corricci from 23 to 25 September, further guest programmes from José Luis Castillo and Salvador Vázquez, a chamber music festival, a symphonic José José evening, participation in the Manuel Enríquez international new music forum, and a Christmas concert on 11 December. The orchestra's marketing reports more season subscriptions sold than in previous years.

Where things stand now

The most recent major date was away from home. On 25 October 2026 the orchestra played the Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris in Mexico City to an audience of more than a thousand, closing the 19th International Poster Biennial, at which Veracruz was guest of honour. The programme opened with Ciudad de México by Diana Syrse — a piece that has the players using pre-Hispanic ocarinas for bird calls and flexible hoses for the noise of the capital — and continued with Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Lebel said the Syrse performance was a way of celebrating the city and thanking the Biennial's organisers. Moncayo's Huapango followed as an encore, played without rehearsal, and brought the house to its feet.

Practically, almost everything the orchestra does is sold locally rather than through national ticketing, which is why listings outside Veracruz are thin: the Friday series at Tlaqná is the product, and out-of-town concerts are one-off invitations. The next fixed point is already visible — the orchestra reaches its hundredth anniversary in 2029.