Robert Trevino’s first album together the Basque National Orchestra featuring orchestral works by the great French-Basque composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) received an excellent response. The programme in this second volume is perhaps more ‘French’ in nature, but the Basque orchestra is giving dazzling performances of these works by their own national composer. While the first album was focused on some of Ravel’s most popular orchestral works, this album includes some rarities, including Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) in its complete ballet version, as well as one world première recording: Pierre Boulez’s orchestration of Ravel’s World War I era piano work, Frontispice.

The Basque National Orchestra, the leading symphony orchestra from an autonomous region nationwide, was created in 1982 on the basis of a project assigned to Imanol Olaizola, at that time music director with the Basque Government Department of Culture. Since Enrique Jordá took up the baton of a newly born formation as its artistic advisor and directed its first steps, different conductors have played their part in nurturing the quality and reach of the Basque Orchestra. Today Robert Treviño is its chief conductor. Jun Märkl, Andrey Boreyko (as principal guest conductor), Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Gilbert Varga and Cristian Mandeal, Mario Venzago, Hans Graf, Miguel Ángel Gómez Martínez, Matthias Kuntzsch, Maximiano Valdés and Jordá himself, its honorary conductor, have governed the fate of the Orchestra in its rising trajectory. A well-structured, dynamic activity with its roots in Basque cultural life has prompted the Basque National Orchestra to give more than 100 concerts every season, distributed into different cycles and in collaboration with different national and international institutions.

Robert Trevino’s star has risen rapidly among American conductors. The past years have seen his appointments as Music Director of the Basque National Orchestra and Chief Conductor of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. In 2021 The Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai (the RAI National Symphony Orchestra) announced the appointment of Robert Trevino as their new Principal Guest Conductor for the initial period of three years starting in the 2021/22 season. Trevino and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra (Malmö SymfoniOrkester) have also announced a mutual commitment for a further two years, with Trevino assuming the position of Artistic Advisor for the 2021/22 season. Trevino burst into the international spotlight at the Bolshoi Theater in December 2013, leading a new production of Verdi’s Don Carlo. He was nominated for a Golden Mask award, and one reviewer wrote, “There has not been an American success of this magnitude in Moscow since Van Cliburn.” Recent seasons have seen an ever-growing number of major debuts with orchestras around the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Tonhalle Zurich, San Francisco Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Sao Paulo Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Orchestre Nationale de France, Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin, and Helsinki Philharmonic, among others.