Orchestral splendor: Miguel Harth-Bedoya's sublime interpretation of classical music has enchanted audiences worldwide, gained him global recognition, and launched him on a fast track to the top - Leader Of The Future

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, August-Sept, 2003 by Rick Wills

Fort Worth, TX

As risky as making such a prediction about a 33-year-old musician might be, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, a Peruvian, seems to be on a fast track to leading one of the world's top orchestras.

His rise has been nothing less than meteoric, winning the admiration of many musicians and the praise of tough and influential music critics in New York and elsewhere.

Like most conductors, Harth-Bedoya, who is also an associate conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of the Auckland Philharmonia in New Zealand, leads a peripatetic life. His dozens of appearances with North American orchestras have included coveted stints conducting symphonies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. In August Harth-Bedoya is scheduled to conduct the music of George Gershwin at the summer festival of the Cleveland Orchestra, considered by many music critics to be one of the two of three best in the world.

By the accounts of musicians and critics alike, he is fast becoming the most prominent Latino orchestra conductor since Mexico's late Eduardo Mata, who was music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. "He is a born communicator. He will go very, very far," said Esa Peka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Harth-Bedoya has persistently wooed the best of soloists to Fort Worth, Texas, including pianist Emmanuel Ax and cellist Lynn Harrel. Both are scheduled to perform with the orchestra next year.

Harth-Bedoya's current life is vastly different from his youth in Lima, where he says he had a fairly typical childhood that included sports and piano lessons.

"I played soccer and worked in the opera house doing all kinds of things," he said. "That is where I got my start in music."

He said of his relatively late start in the field, "I did not grow up with the pressure that many musicians have." By the time he was a student of conducting at the Juilliard School in New York, he was fully committed to working as an orchestra director, no matter how much drive it took. It paid off, and he became music director of the Eugene Symphony in Oregon and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Lima, before beating out several talented competitors for the Fort Worth job three years ago.

Renowned violinist, Isaac Stern, said a conductor, "has to convince the men and women of the orchestra, whether there are 10, 30, of 100 of them, that he knows more than all of them combined--and that is just the beginning of it."

Despite the fierce competition in his profession, Harth-Bedoya is more interested in where he is today--and how the music sounds at each performance--than in where he might be in a decade or two. "My work is the musical image and sound of any orchestra I am with," he said.