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.

Dallas-born mezzo-soprano Josefina Maldonado has been critically acclaimed by The Texas Classical Review and Theater Jones as “vocally superb” with a “remarkably rich timbre.” Maldonado was a young artist with The Dallas Opera Outreach Program in multiple roles in 2019. That year she also made her European debut as a principal artist in the modern-day premieres of two 17^th-century serenatas by Johannes Schmelzer, Le veglie ossequiose and Die sieben Alter stimmen zusammen, for the Olomouc’s Baroque Festival in the Czech Republic.

In May 2022, she made her debut with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at the Cincinnati May Festival in John Adams’s El Niño, conducted by the composer, followed by her debut with the Cleveland Orchestra in the same role in November 2022. She was reengaged by the Cleveland Orchestra to sing Julia Perry’s Stabat Mater in March 2024, conducted by Dalia Stasevska.
She made her debut in May 2025 with the San Antonio Philharmonic in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 conducted by Jeffrey Kahane and has been invited back in 2026 for Bach’s B Minor Mass. This is her Houston Symphony debut.

Maldonado holds a degree from the University of North Texas where she was a frequently featured soloist with the UNT Symphony Orchestra and UNT Opera.