The Orquesta de Cámara de Bellas Artes turns seventy on October 18 with a string-only bash inside the Palacio de Bellas Artes that promises more tension than a violin string at full stretch. Under artistic director Luis Manuel Sánchez Rivas, the ensemble will play Bach’s Suite No. 3 without a conductor, Grieg’s Holberg Suite and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florencia, letting the instruments argue among themselves like relatives at a family reunion that somehow stays in tune.
Sánchez Rivas, who traded tuba and percussion for the baton four years ago, treats the milestone as an excuse to keep the classics while sneaking in new tricks. The no-director Bach moment turns the concertmaster into a one-man traffic cop for bows and elbows, proving that seventy years of practice can still produce controlled chaos. Meanwhile the OCBA Contigo program keeps sneaking musicians into asylums, shelters and prisons so the music reaches people who never bought a ticket, because culture apparently travels better than excuses.
Free Sunday concerts at the Conservatorio Nacional and Jardín Escénico already let families test the same programs that charge inside the Sala Manuel M. Ponce, confirming that the orchestra believes music belongs to everyone who can sit still for an hour. Sánchez Rivas wants the next decades remembered as the period when the stage stopped feeling like a wall and started acting like a very polite invitation.
Seventy years later the strings remain loud, the audiences keep growing and the only thing that refuses to age is the collective refusal to play the same old song the same old way.
