Alondra de la Parra

Alondra de la Parra has spent much of 2026 between Mexico and Madrid, but the most interesting part is how closely those two worlds have begun to connect for her. The Mexican conductor is no longer simply arriving at an orchestra, taking the podium and moving on to the next engagement. She is building festivals, developing productions and bringing the musicians and ideas from one project into another.

That became especially clear at Festival PAAX GNP, which she founded in the Mexican Caribbean in 2022. After its fourth edition in 2025, which ¡HOLA! Américas attended, the festival returned in July 2026 for its fifth year. This time, the Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid (ORCAM) traveled to Mexico as an invited ensemble, joining de la Parra’s Impossible Orchestra. For de la Parra, ORCAM’s principal conductor and artistic director since 2024, it brought her worlds in Mexico and Madrid together.

The program also introduced @Carmen, the reel story, de la Parra’s contemporary take on Bizet’s opera, staged by Bárbara Lluch. The production shifts Carmen into the social-media age, where attraction, identity and public judgment unfold before an audience that is always watching and commenting. After its July performance in Mexico, de la Parra brought the production to Spain in September as part of another project she was helping establish.

© Europa Press News

Since November 2025, she has also served as artistic director of the Teatro Auditorio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, outside Madrid. In 2026, she inaugurated Escena Escorial, a new performing-arts festival that ran from August 28 through September 19. @Carmen was part of its first program, while Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra closed the festival.

Her interest in stretching the boundaries of the traditional concert hall was already visible in 2025. In March, Madrid’s Teatros del Canal presented The Silence of Sound, her multidisciplinary collaboration with fellow Mexican artist Gabriela Muñoz, "Chula the Clown," bringing orchestral music and physical theater into the same production.

Then came one of de la Parra’s most visible Madrid moments. In September 2026, she stood on the Formula 1 starting grid before 22 drivers and conducted Spain’s national anthem with ORCAM as the sport returned to Madrid after more than 45 years. King Felipe VI, Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía were there for the occasion, and de la Parra later shared a selfie with the princess and infanta. As she told ¡HOLA!, it was a day she would keep with her forever.

© Borja B. Hojas

That same month brought another project back to Mexico. On September 18, de la Parra and The Impossible Orchestra released Horizons: Live at Festival PAAX GNP, recorded at the festival she created. The album features music by Paquito D’Rivera, Omar Massa, Yamandu Costa and Sérgio Assad, continuing her long-standing commitment to placing music from the Americas prominently within the orchestral world.

That idea reaches back to the beginning of her career. Born in New York and raised in Mexico City, de la Parra founded the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas in New York at 23, creating an ensemble with a particular focus on composers and musicians from the Americas. Years later, she broke another barrier when she became the first woman appointed music director of an Australian orchestra, leading the Queensland Symphony Orchestra from 2017 to 2019.

For de la Parra, the podium is increasingly only the beginning. Whether she is bringing a Madrid orchestra to the Mexican Caribbean, reinventing Carmen for a digital generation, or creating an entirely new festival, she is expanding where orchestral music can live and who gets invited into the experience.