BIO

Spanish orchestra conductor and composer Alberto Roque Santana, was born in La Laguna (Tenerife, Canary Islands) in 1961.

From 1998-2010 he was the Music Director and Conductor of the Hungarian Chamber Symphony Orchestra in Budapest. He regularly performed as guest conductor with several orchestras in Hungary and abroad. His tours have covered Austria, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland, Italy, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Venezuela, Brazil, Australia, and the United States.

He has commissioned a long list of orchestral works, and performed a number of significant premieres in Hungary: compositions by Frank Martin, Schnittke, Russo, García Abril, Guinjoan, Rodrigo, Falcón Sanabria, de Pablo, Montsalvatge, Leonardo Balada, G. Díaz-Jerez, Rautavaara, Kokkonen, Schoeck, Liebermann, Kaulkin, Hawkins, Weisberg, and Barber, among many others.

At repeated invitations over several years of the late Maestro Sir Georg Solti, Alberto Roque Santana attended the Maestro's work in London, Salzburg, and Chicago. As a conductor, he recognizes Solti as his principal artistic influence. In 1998 he was invited to conduct the 'Homage to Sir Georg Solti' in Budapest, with Hungarian-British pianist Peter Frankl as a soloist.

He studied Piano at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Tenerife and Composition at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest (Hungary) with professors Emil Petrovics and János Vajda. Having also worked as a coach and conductor at the International Opera Studio of the Zürich Opera (Switzerland), he pursued further studies with Franco Donatoni in Siena (Italy) and with Leonard Bernstein in Schleswig-Holstein (Germany).

Alberto Roque Santana's compositions have been widely performed internationally. He has a long list of works for piano, voice and piano, choral music, and chamber music, as well as concertos, the oratorio ‘Threnos, de morte Barbarae matris’ after the poem by Janus Pannonius -commissioned by the European Union in 2015-, and two operas: ‘María Liberata’ (2015), in two acts, with a libretto by Spanish writer Antonio Tabares, and ‘La Diva’ (2020): an opera in two acts after a libretto in Italian by Hungarian soprano Sylvia Sass, about Maria Callas.