A Colombian name on an American concert programme used to raise eyebrows. These days, says Juan Felipe Molano — music director of the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra and a conductor with more than two decades of international work — it signals quality.

The numbers back him up, up to a point. The League of American Orchestras reports that the share of Hispanic music directors at US orchestras nearly doubled over the decade to 2023, from 5% to 9.9%, and the share of Hispanic musicians rose from 2.5% to 4.8%. That still trails the 20.5% of Americans who identify as Hispanic, but the visibility is real: Gustavo Dudamel of Venezuela now heads the New York Philharmonic after 17 seasons in Los Angeles, Carlos Miguel Prieto conducts the North Carolina Symphony, and Giancarlo Guerrero leads the Sarasota Orchestra. Colombians are on the list too, including LA Opera resident conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados and cellist Santiago Cañon-Valencia, a 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition silver medallist.

Molano's own path reads like a map of musical crossings. His first teacher was his uncle, a Czech guitarist who fled World War II and landed at the conservatory of the University of Antioquia in Medellín. Molano played clarinet in the town band of Andes, a small Antioquia town, before switching to piano and studying under Colombian pianist Teresita Gomez. He later earned a conducting diploma at the Vienna Conservatory, where one of his teachers, Reinhard Schwarz, spent over a decade as assistant to Herbert von Karajan.

Since then he has led orchestras across the US, Asia, Europe, Colombia and Mexico — including the Yucatán Symphony Orchestra in 2003 — and worked with Batuta, Colombia's youth music network, which has reached more than a million children since 1991. He took over Los Angeles's Youth Orchestra Los Angeles in 2014 when it had around 650 students, and Seattle hired him in 2019. He still returns each year to Mexico's Morelia Music Festival, where he directs a sinfonietta of young Mexican players. Youth orchestras, he says, are what keep him refreshed: watching a musician grow from first rehearsal to concert is the work he cares about most.

His programming shows the same openness he sees as a Latino strength. This Halloween he conducts the Boise Philharmonic in a programme jumping from Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" to Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," Saint-Saëns' "Danse Macabre" and John Williams' "Jaws" and "Harry Potter" suites. In November at Morelia, he pairs Piazzolla with Britten, a Japanese composer, and a world premiere by a local Mexican composer.

For travellers, this is a good moment to time a trip around classical music in Latin America. Medellín's conservatory scene, Antioquia's town band festivals and the Morelia festival in Michoacán — held in one of Mexico's most beautiful colonial cities — all offer world-class music far from the usual concert-hall capitals. If you want to hear the next generation of international soloists early, a youth orchestra festival is the place to do it.

Story via Colombia One.