SALT LAKE CITY — At one time in her life, Jessica Rivero Altarriba planned to be a salsa singer. Instead, she became assistant conductor at the Utah Symphony.
Altarriba, from Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, was encouraged by her father, a popular music percussionist, (her mother taught literature), to study music. She learned to play piano and flute, and he hoped she would eventually join his band, but, to his disappointment, she instead chose a career in classical music.
It was at a music conservatory that she saw conductor and then-instructor Cosette Justo Valdés rehearse Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” with a student orchestra and decided she wanted to be on the podium, too.
“She tells me that when she saw me working and with so much, you know, passion for what I was doing” she became interested in conducting, Valdés recalled. “She had many questions, of course — how difficult it is, how do you start preparing,”
“When I was a (flute) player, I was just thinking about doing my part, but then I started to be more worried about people, the sense of community,” Altarriba said. “Coming from Cuba, you don’t have privacy. You are, like, three, four generations together and (in) the same house, so I love to be surrounded by people.”
After finishing her music studies in Cuba, she moved to Spain to begin her conducting career, but a pandemic changed her plans.
Altarriba applied for the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, named for famed conductor Marin Alsop, the first woman to lead a major American orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony.
Alsop said she felt Altarriba wasn’t ready for the program but instead invited her to study at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, where the conductor teaches.
Due to the school’s deadlines, Altarriba had 48 hours to make a decision and, despite the fact that she didn’t speak English, agreed to study under Alsop.
“I think she’s one of the best students I’ve ever had,” Alsop said. “She was mature enough even when she got there to understand that these were limited opportunities that she had, and she had to maximize them.”
Within Cuba, Altarriba said, there is gender equity in the music profession, but outside the country, women and people of color have historically been underrepresented on the podium.
According to the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, about 24% of conductors are female. Altarriba said musical director positions at major orchestras are almost entirely filled by men.
Altarriba eventually became a Taki Alsop fellow. Last season, she served a fellowship at the New Jersey Symphony, and this season she was named the Utah Symphony’s new assistant conductor.
Her duties include conducting educational school concerts and serving a residency at Cottonwood High School.
At the initial question and answer session with Cottonwood music students, she tried to impress upon them the fact that they have opportunities that many do not.
When Altarriba was 6 and began studying piano, a requirement for all music students, she didn’t have an instrument to practice with, so she made one out of floor tiles.
“My idea is to open your eyes about how privileged you are to discover music in such a deep level,” she told them. “So, don’t take that opportunity for granted.”
A few weeks later, Altarriba rehearsed the “Jupiter” movement of Holst’s “The Planets” with the student orchestra.
Student and bassist Victoria Gordon was impressed.
“She’s strong, and she knows what she wants,” she said. “She’s been that way since she was 6 with the tile piano. Know what you want, and do whatever you can to get it.”
“She just sort of inspires confidence in the orchestra,” Cellist Rhona Van Merwe said. “Like the way we played today was really full, and I could really feel the difference after she told us how to play something, and you could just feel how passionate she was about it, and then we sort of reflected that back at her. And I think that’s really inspiring even just for my own playing.”
Altarriba told the students the one thing they need above all else to pursue music or any other career, is passion.
“It’s really important as a musician to not let nothing stop you, not even the absence of resources,” she said.
“If you don’t have discipline and passion about what you do in life, then you have nothing,” she said. “As long as you are passionate, you are gonna be, sooner or later in the place you should be.”
In addition to the school performances, Altarriba will conduct family concerts — Gold Rush: An American Musical Adventure March 15 and Wild Symphony April 12 — and some concerts at Deer Valley.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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Publish date : 2025-02-24 02:24:00
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