Benjamín Juárez Echenique

Benjamin Juarez Echenique is a music conductor, born in Mexico City on July 17, 1951. He studied in Mexico at the National School of Music, National University of Mexico, the California Institute of the Arts, where he obtained his Master of Fine Arts in Music, as well as in Italy, France and England. He has conducted Mexico’s leading symphonic orchestras and has been on the conducting staff of the State of Mexico Symphony and Mexico City Philharmonic. He was Head of the Music Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Musical Director of the Mexico City’s Grand Festival, and taught at the UNAM, the National Conservatory and the Superior School of Music of Institute of Fine Arts. He also founded the early music group Angelicum of Puebla, devoted to the rescue of the music of the seventeenth century from Puebla’s Cathedral Archives. Juárez Echenique has also produced and presented hundreds of radio and television programs in Mexico. His recordings of works of Baroque Mexican masters such as Ignacio Jerusalem y Stella, Francisco Delgado, Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Manuel Arenzana and Fabián Ximeno for the Urtext label won him a Latin Grammy nomination in 2001. The same year he received the "Mexico Unido en sus valores Culturales" award.

On September 2006 he was appointed General Director of Mexico’s National Arts Center Centro Nacional de las Artes CENART as the result of a civil service selection process. He is the senior member of Mexico's Civil Service in the cultural sector.

External links

* [http://www.cenart.gob.mx]
* [http://www.classicstoday.com/review.asp?ReviewNum=3742 Album review]
* [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~hispanic/stanford1.html Article: "Nationalism and the Rescue of Mexico's Musical Past"]