From Peru, Jimmy López

Hailed as an “undeniably exciting composer” by Opera News, Jimmy López  displays “a brilliant command of orchestral timbres and textures” (Dallas Morning News) and “a virtuoso mastery of the modern orchestra” (The New Yorker). His works have been performed around the world by leading orchestras and in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House, Kennedy Center and Konzerthaus Berlin.

For the 2024-25 season López is a Mead Composer-Curator with Chicago Symphony Orchestra; he will curate an evening of chamber music for CSO’s MusicNOW series. A new orchestral work, written for and dedicated to conductor Christian Reif, will be premiered by the Cincinnati, Detroit and Gävle symphony orchestras, which commissioned the piece. Elsewhere, his works will be performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Naples Philharmonic, Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, Oregon Symphony and Sarasota Orchestra.

During the 2023-24 season, the first part of his Symphony No. 4: Eclipse received its world premiere by the Houston Symphony and Andrés Orozco-Estrada; tenor Michael Fabiano premiered a new song cycle titled Quiet Poems at Arizona’s Tucson Desert Song Festival; López’s new trombone concerto Shift was premiered by soloist Jörgen van Rijen, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Tarmo Peltokoski. Further performances will occur during the 2025-26 season by co-commissioners San Francisco Symphony and San Diego Symphony.

Other highlights include the orchestral work Loud (2023), which received its world premiere in San Francisco by International Pride Orchestra, conducted by Christine Brandes. Loud was co-commissioned by San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. His critically acclaimed orchestral tone poem Aino (2022) was commissioned and premiered by Orchestre de Paris, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Klaus Mäkelä, and has since been performed in the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic and elsewhere in the United States. 

In December 2022, mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and Catalyst Quartet gave the world premiere of López’s song cycle Airs for Mother at the 92nd NY Center for Culture & Arts in New York City. His piano concerto Ephemerae (2021), commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado and Philadelphia Orchestra, continues to receive performances by its dedicatee Javier Perianes. López’s Symphony No. 3, Altered Landscape (2020), a collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art, was premiered in May 2022 by Reno Philharmonic, conducted by Laura Jackson.

His discography includes four portrait albums dedicated to his works, notably “Aurora & Ad Astra” (2022), released by Pentatone and featuring Andrés Orozco-Estrada, violinist Leticia Moreno and the Houston Symphony. Aurora was nominated for a 2022 Latin Grammy in the category of best classical contemporary composition. The same year, his song Where Once We Sang with lyrics by Mark Campbell was also recorded on Pentatone by mezzo soprano Sasha Cooke and pianist Kirill Kuzmin.

A native of Lima, López studied at the city’s National Conservatory of Music before graduating from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with a master of music degree. He currently lives in California and completed his doctorate in music at the University of California-Berkeley.

Jimmy López is the curator of the MusicNOW concert Inner Dialogues on March 23.