The Jalisco Culture Department will present the third edition of Festival África en Jalisco next week, with events running October 21–24 in three Guadalajara venues. 

The Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra (OFJ) season kicks off Thursday, October 15 with an impressive program of music by composers who “reinvented listening.” This opener, conducted by OFJ music director Jose Luis Castillo, focuses on musical transformations in Europe, ending with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, called his most spontaneous.

Castillo, born in Valencia, Spain, appears to be bringing wide-ranging, continental influences to Guadalajara, where he dips them into the local and Latin American mix.

An example is Program 2, with the young Belgian cellist David Cohen invited to play an avant-garde work by Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. And Program 4, with Italian director Alfonso Scarano (conductor of the Yucatan Symphony Orchestra) and pianist Rodolfo Ritter playing a concerto by Gonzalo Curiel of Golden Age of Mexican Cinema fame, topped off with selections from Tchaikovsky’s revolutionary ballet “Swan Lake,” which catapulted dance music into the heights of serious, orchestral composition, instead of merely background music.

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Ópera Jalisco will present its Gala Mozart on October 17, 8 p.m. at the Teatro Degollado, featuring excerpts from “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “The Magic Flute,” under the musical direction of Rodrigo Sierra Moncayo.

Contemporary dance is alive and well in our region. The 29th Festival Internacional de Danza Jalisco, from October 3-10, brings 26 dance productions from four countries to venues across Guadalajara, Zapopan, Etzatlán and Ajijic.

Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra

In a prelude to the eight-program winter season that starts on October 15 (see next week’s Reporter), OFJ music director José Luis Castillo conducts works by Alberto Ginastera, Carlos Chávez and Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony.   

Teatro Degollado, Sunday, October 4, 12:30 p.m.

Canadian crooner Michael Bublé inaugurated Guadalajara’s new Coliseo GNP Seguros on September 22, performing for around 30,000 fans at the former Estadio Tres de Marzo, owned by the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (UAG).