History

Orfeón San Juan Bautista is a professional chamber choral ensemble created in 2001. It is directed by professor Guarionex Morales Matos (its founder) and doctor Daniel Alejandro Tapia Santiago. Its repertoire includes sacred and secular works from the great universal traditions, as well as folkloric and popular pieces from Puerto Rico and Ibero-America. This diverse collection of compositions is featured in the following discography: Puerto Rico a capella (2002), Yale Institute of Sacred Music: Orfeón San Juan Bautista (2002), Reverencia (2004), El Orfeón (2005), Pura Navidad (2005), Antología: Quinto Aniversario 2001-2006 (2006), Himno al Alma Mater (2006), Pentagrama en blanco y negro: las voces de Jack Délano (1914-1997) (2007), Estampas criollas (2007), Cantos sagrados (2011), Orfeón San Juan Bautista: Cronología en música, grabaciones selectas 2001-2012 (2012), La Garita del Diablo (2013), Glorificamus te (2015), VII (2016), Anti-fonal (2016), Orfeón San Juan Bautista: quince años de absoluta armonía 2001-2016 (2017), and Por fin llegaron (2018).

The expressiveness, the technical skill, and the consistent exceptionality of Orfeón all distinguish its 12 annual musical performances in Puerto Rico. Outside of the island, it has offered concerts at Yale University (Connecticut, US, 2002); the Chiesa di Santo Stefano al Ponte Vecchio (Florence, Italy, 2005); Ohio State University, Dayton University, and Sinclair College (Ohio, US, 2005); Trinity Episcopal Cathedral (Florida, US, 2007); Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, The Spence School, and The Church of the Blessed Sacrament (New York, US, 2008); the Iglesia de San Alberto and the Iglesia de San Marcos (Sevilla and Huelva, Spain, 2010); the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and the Catedral Metropolitana Santa María de la Encarnación, Primada de América (Dominican Republic, 2011); the Sala Beethoven del Conservatorio Antonio María Valencia (Santiago de Cali, Colombia, 2012); St. James United Church and l’Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal (Montreal, French Canada, 2013); Harvard University and Westminster Choir College (Boston and New Jersey, US, 2014); the Oratorio San Felipe Neri and the Basílica Menor de San Francisco de Asís (Habana, Cuba, 2015); The Hispanic Society of America (New York, US, 2016); and the Teatro de la Ciudad de Puebla and the Foro Boca (Puebla and Veracruz, Mexico, 2019).

The ensemble is committed to Puerto Rican composers and the fostering of contemporary works. For this reason, it holds yearly music premieres and in 2011 founded the Concurso de Composición Orfeón San Juan Bautista, a music composition contest for undergraduate students. Moreover, in March 2006, along with the Asociación de Exalumnos de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (the University of Puerto Rico Alumni Association), it established the Beca Abel Di Marco, a scholarship aimed at providing musical instruments to academically distinguished students.

Daniel Alejandro Tapia Santiago

Music and Artistic Director

Doctor Daniel Alejandro Tapia Santiago, was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, he was awarded a full merit scholarship to study at the Yale School of Music and its Institute of Sacred Music, where he earned a master’s degree in music with a concentration in choral conducting. He subsequently studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a second full merit scholarship. There he earned a doctoral degree in musical arts with a primary concentration in orchestral and choral conducting and a secondary concentration in harpsichord performance, the latter under the mentorship of the renowned harpsichordist Charlotte Mattax-Moersch. Tapia Santiago is Orfeón San Juan Bautista’s music director. In said capacity, he worked alongside Guillermo Figueroa and Maximiano Valdés Soublette, titular directors of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra and the Casals Festival, in their concert seasons. Moreover, he has led the choir in performances in Spain, Italy, French Canada, the United States, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Mexico, as well as on multiple professional recordings. He collaborated as well with directors Marguerite Brooks, Michael Beck, and Joseph Flummerfelt in the preparation of Brahms’ A German Requiem, Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B minor, respectively. Moreover, he premiered works by numerous contemporary composers, such as Ernesto Cordero, Loyda Camacho, Alfonso Fuentes, Robert Manthey, and Benjamin Montalbano. His contributions to academic literature include “Jack Délano’s (1914-1997) ‘Burundanga or Cantata Antillana’: an art-music portrayal of Luis Palés Matos’s (1898-1959) black Caribbean,” a detailed analysis of this choral-symphonic work and its relationship to the poetry of Luis Pales Matos. Another significant contribution is his essay “Un compositor de entresiglos: obra y estilo musical,” a prologue to two publications by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture: Música popular puertorriqueña: adaptaciones corales and Composiciones corales originales (1994-2014), which compile original pieces and arrangements by Puerto Rican contemporary composer Guarionex Morales Matos (b. 1968). He served as professor and choral director at the University of Puerto Rico, and he regularly acts as a musical advisor and evaluator on various committees at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. He is currently Assistant Professor at Universidad Ana G. Méndez’s humanities department, where he also directs its choral program.

Guarionex Morales Matos

Composer, arranger and co-director

In 2001, he established the Orfeón San Juan Bautista, a professional secular choir currently under his co-direction. As an arranger and composer, he has written more than a hundred pieces of music, most of which are a cappella choral works. However, he has also composed art songs, film scores, choral music with instrumental accompaniment, choral symphonies, ballet music, opera and a cappella choral adaptations of popular and folkloric music from Ibero-America. His compositions have been performed in Spain, Italy, Poland, France, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Canada, the United States, and Austria, where the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra played, along with tenor Joel Prieto, Morales’ adaptation of Villancico yaucano by Amaury Veray Torregrosa (1922-1995). This performance took place at the annual concert Christmas In Vienna (2013), under the musical direction of Erwin Ortner. In 2014, Prieto recorded Misa a San Francisco de Asís, another composition by Morales for mixed chorus, the oboe, the harp, the cello, and the harpsichord. In 2014, he wrote Fault Lines, a piece for sopraninos commissioned by the plastic artists of Allora & Calzadilla. It premiered in New York during the exhibition of the same name in September of that year andis now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Along with Allora & Calzadilla, he composed the soundtracks of two short films called Breaking into Trunks (2017) and Foreign in a Domestic Sense (2017). Other works by Morales include international collaborations with the Vassar College Women’s Chorus (US), Exaudi (Cuba), Seraphic Fire (US), el Coro de la Universidad Central de Venezuela and The Elm City Girls’ Choir (US). In Puerto Rico, the main national choruses have sung his arrangements and many of them commission him periodically to create music. For eight years (2004-2012), Morales Matos served as the radio announcer, script writer, and producer of Mayormente a capella, a radio series specialized in choral music aired on Radio Universidad, the University of Puerto Rico’s radio station. He also worked as a professor of music and art history at the Universidad Central de Bayamón (Bayamón Central University) and boasts countless collaborations in the field of advertising, among other professional activities. As part of his volunteer work, Morales Matos headed the board of the directors of the Asociación de Exalumnos de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (the association of former students of the University of Puerto Rico) from 2003 to 2013. Guarionex Morales Matos holds a bachelor’s degree in public communications and a master’s degree in cultural management and administration, both from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus.

Board of directors

Don Manuel Junco,
President of the Board of Directors
Profesora Liliana Duluc,
Vice President of the Board of Directors
Dr. Daniel Alejandro Tapia Santiago,
Chief Executive Officer and Music Director
Profesor Guarionex Morales Matos,
Auxiliary Chief Executive Officer and Co-Music Director
Doña Mariselle Martínez Acosta,
Director, Secretary-Treasurer
Doña Eliet Torres,
Director
Doña Julia María Meconiates,
Director
Doña Elsa Mosquera Sterenberg,
Director