Closing Night Performance and Reception: María Toro Trío with Nélida Tirado

María Toro Flamenco Trío Spanish flute player and composer María Toro presents his flamenco project along with Guillermo Barrón and Adrián Alvarado. These three musicians, regulars within the NYC musical scene over the past decade, conform a very special mixture in accordance with their different origins. The rhythmic support of Mexican Guillermo Barrón’s, a very well-known man in Latin jazz, backs up Adrian Alvarado's flamenco guitar. Born in Sao Paulo, Alvarado contributes with his Brazilian touch to María Toro's repertoire. Famous for her capacity to absorb local textures everywhere she goes, Toro compiles in this trio her career's best brilliant moments. She initiated and settled within flamenco but incorporated the profusion of jazz and other popular kinds of music, from which this project also benefits. This trio symbolizes the union of cultures in the most current universal meeting point, the US, led by the Spanish force of María Toro, seconded by representatives of two of the biggest and most populated countries in Latin America. Nélida Tirado hailed “magnificent and utterly compelling” by the New York Times, Tirado began her formal training at the Ballet Hispanico of New York at the age of six. Barely out of her teens, she was invited to tour the U.S. with José Molina of Bailes Españoles and work as a soloist in Carlota Santana’s Flamenco Vivo. Tirado served as a soloist and dance captain of the María Pagés Dance Company and Antonio El Pipa Dance Company, performing at prestigious flamenco festivals and on television in Spain and throughout France, Italy, UK, Germany and Japan. She has performed in Carmen with the Metropolitan Opera of NY, the World Music Institute’s Gypsy Caravan 1 and Noche Flamenca and was the featured flamenco star in River Dance on Broadway and touring companies.