When Robert Trevino led the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra earlier this season, it was a momentous homecoming for the conductor. Raised in North Richland Hills, Trevino, now 36, still holds strong ties to the region. In fact, several family members and music teachers attended his FWSO premiere.
“One of the assistants said they had never seen so many people backstage,” says Trevino, music director of the Basque National Orchestra in Spain and chief conductor of the Malmö Symphony in Sweden.
Not the least of Trevino’s accomplishments is a new CD set of the complete Beethoven symphonies, a rare endorsement for a relatively young conductor who’s not yet well known. (See companion review by Scott Cantrell, longtime classical music critic of The Dallas Morning News.)
Trevino grew up listening to the FWSO, and it was the first professional symphony he heard live. “For me to go back to Fort Worth and conduct the orchestra, that was such an emotional [event],” he says in a video call from San Sebastián, in Spain’s Basque country.
Humble beginnings
What makes Trevino’s return all the more remarkable is his humble beginnings. Although his father worked several jobs, including at Chuck E. Cheese and Pizza Hut, the family couldn’t afford electricity. They lit their home with candles at night, and kept food in an ice cooler.
At about 8 years old, Trevino was in the car with his dad, who was looking for Carlos Santana or the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the radio. His father happened to land on WRR-FM (101.1), which was playing the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem. Trevino was hooked. “I knew whatever that was, I wanted to do it,” he says.
After hearing Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in elementary school, Trevino resolved to learn the bassoon. Lessons followed with Charles Hall, adjunct faculty member at Texas Christian University, but Trevino’s main interest was conducting. Hall became his first conducting teacher as well, and together they studied Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
To pay for lessons, Trevino did odd jobs with his dad over the summer. “I was mowing yards, doing trash work for people, painting houses [and] changing oil,” he says.
Big breaks
For college, Trevino didn’t go to one of the conservatories known for turning out conductors. Instead, he attended the University of Texas at Arlington before transferring to Roosevelt University in Chicago, where his major was in bassoon performance.
At UTA, Trevino assembled and conducted his own orchestra, and he conducted professionally for the first time at 19, when he led the Ohio Light Opera.
Trevino says his first big breaks were participating in the 2011 Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview in New Orleans and studying with David Zinman at the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado.
In addition to Zinman, Trevino has learned from other prestigious mentors, including Michael Tilson Thomas, Leif Segerstam and Kurt Masur, with whom he studied six times. “I can regurgitate every single thing that man taught me, and I know people who worked with him for years and can barely manage that,” he says.
Typically, Trevino spends months hopping around the globe to conduct operas and orchestras. In March 2019, he led a production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Washington National Opera, and this summer he was scheduled to conduct Bizet’s Carmen at the Zurich Opera before the COVID-19 cancellations. He’s also conducted top-notch symphonies, including the Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony and the Orchestre de Paris. “I live out of my suitcase all the time,” he says.
During the pandemic, Trevino has led the Basque orchestra in hourlong concerts broadcast live by a regional television station. Because of his experience in opera, he’s used to conducting musicians far away from him, and finds that this has helped him with the socially distanced performances.
Beethoven cycle
Over two weeks last October, Trevino performed and recorded all nine Beethoven symphonies with the Malmö Symphony. The recordings were recently released by the Finnish label Ondine.
Although 2020 marks the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Trevino says the festival was not meant to celebrate the occasion. “I wanted to address a composer who was writing their music for the people,” he says. Even though Beethoven had his faults, Trevino added, “as a composer he was giving.”
With Miguel Harth-Bedoya stepping down as music director of the FWSO at the end of this year, Trevino could be one of the candidates for the position, although the orchestra is naming no names. He certainly impressed critic Cantrell when Trevino guest conducted the FWSO.
“Trevino and the orchestra made the Bartók a showpiece of raw modernist razzle-dazzle,” Cantrell wrote in his review for The News, also noting that Trevino’s interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony “left no doubt of the music’s greatness or his command of it.”
Reflecting on his experience with the FWSO, Trevino found the musicians to be kind, open and enthusiastic. “It felt like a great opportunity for me to come and make music with them,” he says.
While he doesn’t know the status of the FWSO’s search, Trevino is interested in being a music director of an American orchestra. And although he’s active in many countries, he still is an American, he says. “I feel that in many ways, I understand the United States.”
