José Luis Turina

José Luis Turina (born 1952, in Madrid) is a Spanish composer, grandson of Joaquín Turina. He studied composition under Antón García Abril, Román Alís, Rodolfo Halffter and Carmelo Bernaola at the conservatories of Barcelona and Madrid, and then, with a grant from the Spanish Ministry for Foreign Affairs for studying at the Spanish Fine Arts Academy in Rome, he attended the classes in composition given by Franco Donatoni at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. In 1981, his work Meeting Point won the First Prize in the International Composition Contest organised by the Orchestra of the Valencia Conservatory to mark their first centenary. In 1986 he won the First Prize of the Musical Composition Contest “Queen Sofía”, from the Ferrer Salat Foundation, with his piece Ocnos (orchestral music on poems by Luis Cernuda). He was awarded Spain's Premio Nacional de Música for composition in 1996. Teacher of Harmony in the Conservatories of Cuenca and Madrid since 1981, in 1993 he was designated technical advisor of the Ministry for Education and Science, for the reformation of musical teaching in the realm of the new education law of 1990. In February 2001 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Spanish National Youth Orchestra, position he held until his retirement in March 2020, and from 2004 until 2015 he was the President of the Spanish Association of Youth Orchestras. In April 2023 he entered as a member of the Music Section of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In September 2000 the world premiere of his opera D. Q. (Don Quijote in Barcelona), on a text by Justo Navarro and in a production by La Fura dels Baus, took place in the Gran Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona, Spain). In November 2001 the Tokyo String Quartet played with great success the world premiere of his string quartet “Clémisos y Sustalos”, written as a commission for them. In October 2004, the Brodsky Quartet premiered his string quartet “The Seven Last Words of Jesus Christ on the Cross” in Cadiz. In January 2006, he was the focus of the Contemporary Music Cycle of the Málaga Philharmonic Orchestra, which played 18 of his compositions, and released both an extensive biographical study and a CD of five of his orchestral pieces.