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BIOGRAPHY
Conductor Carmen Helena Téllez has been called “a quiet
force behind contemporary Music in the United States
today” by the online music journal Sequenza 21. She has
also earned enthusiastic reviews as an expert in the
performance of contemporary music for voices. She was
born in 1955 in Caracas, Venezuela, where she completed
conservatory studies in piano and composition. She won
an Ayacucho Foundation scholarship to pursue studies in
the United States, where she earned her Doctor of Music
degree at Indiana University in 1988. Her doctoral
document “Musical Form and Dramatic Concept in Handel's
Athalia” won the ACDA Julius Herford National
Dissertation Award in 1991.
Since the beginning of her professional career in 1985,
she has been a regular guest conductor of professional
and academic orchestras and choruses as well as in
international music festivals in Latin America, Europe
and the United States, with which she has developed a
special emphasis on contemporary repertoire, Latin
American composers, and on genres that explore the
relationship of music with other arts. She was the
first foreign Music Director of the National Chorus of
Spain during the1987-88 season, and with this group she
toured Spain and performed in the Casals Festival. She
was also Visiting Assistant Professor at Dartmouth
College in 1990-91.
In 1992, she joined the faculty at the Indiana
University School of Music where she is now Professor of
Choral Conducting, and where she has been asked to
conduct works as varied as Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Orff’s Carmina Burana and Berlioz’s
Requiem with great success. She is also the Director
of the Indiana University Latin American Music Center
and of the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. For these two
organizations she has commissioned and recorded several
new works, and has founded the Series of Publications
and Recordings of the Latin American Music Center as
well as the Inter-American Composition Workshops. Her
recording of Missa ad Consolationis Dominam Nostram
of Mexican composer Mario Lavista, which she
commissioned, has won two awards as the best disc of
Mexican classical music given by the Journal Viceversa
and the Circle of Music and Theater Critics of Mexico in
1998 and 1999. She has since commissioned many other
works, including the Suite de Santa Fe for
narrator, guitar and orchestra of Spanish composer Feliu
Gasull I Altisent with the Santa Fe Symphony, and the
Mass for Solo Voices and Instruments by MacArthur
Fellow John Eaton. She recorded a CD of unknown works of
Carlos Chávez for solo voice, instruments and chorus for
the Colegio Nacional de México and Camerata de las
Américas.
During the 2001-2002 she became the Music Director of
the Contemporary Chamber Players of Chicago, conducting
the second performance ever of the oratorio Praise
by the eminent American composer Ralph Shapey; and the
Midwest premiere of Stephen Hartke’s Pulitzer finalist
work Tituli. In the 2002-2003 season she
conducted the Midwest premiere of John Adams’ El Niño
in her own semi-staged production as well as the
premiere of John Eaton’s opera inasmuch… in New
York City.
As a scholar and conductor Carmen Helena Téllez has won
many grants and awards from the US-Mexico Fund for
Culture, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Indiana Arts
Commission, and the United States Information Agency.
She is a respected consultant with international
organizations and American presenters on contemporary
composers and on Latin American music, and has written
several articles on the subject for the New Grove
Dictionary of Music.
Carmen Helena Téllez is
also one of the founders and creative directors of
Aguavá New Music Studio, a creative group of artists
dedicated to the promotion of contemporary composers.
She has toured the United States, Mexico, Colombia and
Israel with Aguavá and has been the producer of their
three recordings. Her first recording with this group,
entitled Itineraries of the Night, was issued in
2000. Her second CD, Canticum Novum of 2002
garnered rave reviews in the international press. The
third CD was produced in collaboration with the
Bloomington Chamber Singers in 2003, with Cary Boyce’s
oratorio Dreams within a Dream. In the meantime,
she has continued to pursue a successful international
guest conducting career. Her most recent projects
include the commission and world premiere of Cary
Boyce’s cantata Ave Maris Stella at the Festival
Cervantino in Mexico City in October2003, and of Juan
Trigos’ s Missa Cunctipotens Genitor in November
2003 at Indiana University. She was the featured artist
of the online journal Musica-Femina. She is scheduled to
conduct John Eaton’s opera Antigone in New York
next May 2004.
Recent Reviews:
“Aguavá New Music Studio
(conducted by Carmen Helena Téllez) is easily one of the
most impressive ensembles in America today.”
Ivan Moody
International
Record Review, London
“El Niño,
first performed two years ago in Paris, was given its
Midwest premiere Wednesday evening at the Musical Arts
Center, thanks to about 200 choristers, the IU Symphony,
a half dozen soloists and conductor Carmen Tellez.
Leave it to Tellez to take on the grand challenge. Her
way with the Berlioz Requiem is a remembered
for-instance of recent vintage. Here, she's done it
again: engineered a remarkable performance feat.”
Peter Jacobi
The Herald
Times, Bloomington
“The opera was conducted
by the sure-handed Carmen Helena Tellez, one quiet
forces behind contemporary music in America today.”
Jerry Bowles
Sequenza 21, New York |
