Concert Sept. 16 to Honor Roque Cordero's 90th Birthday

Although technically, he will be 90 years and one month old, composer and Illinois State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus Roque Cordero will be the special guest at 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 16, for a birthday concert of his music in Kemp Recital Hall.  Admission is free and open to the public.

“Mensajes y meditaciones del Maestro” (Messages and Meditations from the Maestro) will feature ISU music faculty performing a variety of compositions by the Panamanian composer who taught at Illinois State’s School of Music for three decades.  Cordero currently lives in Dayton, Ohio.  Last month, Dayton’s public radio station featured Cordero’s music on its “Listen Live” program.

Sunday’s program in Kemp will include pianist Paul Borg playing “Tres meditaciones poeticas,” violinist Sarah Gentry performing “Dos piezas cortas,” violist Katherine Lewis playing “Tres mensajes breves, cellist Adrianna LaRosa Ransom playing three movements from “Soliloquios No. 6” and flutist Kim Risinger performing “Four Messages.”

Born August 16, not far from the then-new Panama Canal, Cordero began writing music at an early age.  Since there was no music program at the University of Panama, Cordero accepted a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, where he also studied conducting with the acclaimed Minneapolis Symphony conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos.  Mitropoulos became Cordero’s mentor and premiered Cordero's “Panamanian Overture No. 2” with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1946.

After graduating magna cum laude from Hamline University in St. Paul, Cordero studied conducting at the Berkshire Music Center and then in New York with Leon Barzin.  In 1949, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition and conducting.  A year later he returned to Panama to teach composition and direct the National Conservatory of Music (now called National Institute of Music) until 1964.  In 1966 he returned to the U.S. to help run the Latin American Music Center at Indiana University and in 1972 joined the Illinois State University faculty.  He was named a Distinguished Professor in 1983.

Cordero won the 1974 Koussevitzky International Recording Award (music’s Pulitzer Prize) for his violin concerto, the 1977 Chamber Music Award of the Interamerican Music Competition for his string quartet, the Grand Cross of Vasco Nunez de Balboa (Panama’s highest civilian award) and many others awards and honors.