David Harutyunyan resumes conducting in Mexico: We are unlikely to leave Ecuador

Six years ago, the Armenian-Ecuadorian teacher David Harutyunyan he brought together the musicians with whom he developed one of his most ambitious career dreams: to found the Guayaquil Municipal Philharmonic Orchestra. After being informed of his departure as head of this group, on May 15, Harutyunyan takes over the baton of an orchestra again, but this time on Mexican soil.

This Sunday, the teacher -who was also in charge of the free municipal art schools- traveled to Mexico to participate in a festival that will hold concerts for more than a week and will appoint him as guest conductor of the Jalisco Symphony Orchestra.

“I will be a guest conductor, it is important because it is one of the best orchestras in Mexico, and since I am already Ecuadorian, I will be one of the first to conduct the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra and I will also be in the orchestral conducting master classes”, mentions.

Harutyunyan, 57, also emphasizes that his immediate plans do not foresee a permanent departure from the country. “We talked to Pamela (Cortes). I led the orchestra of the Ricardo Castro de México festival for several years until the pandemic started, which was about four years. It was a very good international festival, they were putting together an orchestra with musicians from many countries, from the United States, Venezuela, Cuba, Spain, Russia, almost 100 musicians. I was going to direct them, the last two years I brought musicians from Ecuador. When they took me out of the Philharmonic, one of the plans was to leave Ecuador, but after thinking about it, it’s highly unlikely. There are two very strong reasons: first, there is her health, all her doctors are here and it is impossible to risk her; and second, Max is at the age where he should continue his studies and is too young to take him on his parents’ adventures,” he says.

According to the musical director, his wife, also an artist Pamela Cortés, plans to join the tour in the middle of the week to take advantage of her stay in Mexico.

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“David has no plans,” he reveals, telling us he’s sitting in college halls these days, where he’s been teaching for over a decade.

“I am a todologist, I have been teaching there for more than ten years, I am in the Faculty of Humanities, in the art academy, I teach various subjects in music history, compositional analysis, now I am going to teach music analysis … the musical form” , he talks about his role as a teacher at the UEES.

For him, he affirms, the most important thing in educating the new generations is to prevent them from repeating the mistakes of the previous generations. “Apart from art, from music, I teach them civic affairs, ideographic connectedness, the artist’s belonging to society and his functions for society. The artist is a person who can exert great influence on the formation of society and that is a responsibility,” he adds.

Disposable people do not exist, no two people are the same, each one is unique, we are all in their historical moment, we create a story and we are responsible for it, so I also teach them that we are not disposable. We are all non-disposable, at no time, no one.

David Harutyunyan

Harutyunyan emphasizes that at the moment we are immersed in a virtual life at all and that life itself is losing its footing. “That is why humanity is getting lost every day, this change is absolutely virtual. Neither music nor painting, art is impossible to teach virtually, art is absolutely physical. As an artist, if you don’t have physical contact with his art, it loses all its value, because every art has the energetic charge of the one who teaches with the one who learns, and without that charge it loses its need and value,” he emphasizes.