Youth Orchestras of San Antonio Music Director Troy Peters believes music can bridge generations, part of the motivation behind the orchestra’s Classic Albums Live series.
For the latest edition on Sunday, Nashville-based musician brothers Emilio and Diego Navaira will join the YOSA Philharmonic at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts for Viva Emilio, a tribute to their famous father, Tejano music star Emilio Navaira.
“What’s great about this is we’ve put a band together of contemporaries, people that are our age that we grew up playing with, that grew up listening to the music,” said drummer Emilio Navaira IV, who played in his Grammy-winning father’s band along with his guitarist brother.
That band will be accompanied by the 40-member YOSA orchestra, lending symphonic power to Navaira’s classic tunes.
“I get goosebumps when I’m on stage and there’s a symphony behind me,” Diego Navaira said. “Because there’s certain songs of my dad’s that get me emotional already, and then to hear it with these beautiful arrangements that Troy Peters has made, it just takes it to a whole different level.”
Discovering the classics
Just as with previous shows featuring music by The Eagles, Prince, and two Beatles-themed concerts the Navaira brothers have performed in, YOSA students sometimes first hear the songs of these classic bands when they perform them, “then go home and add them to their Spotify lists,” Peters said.
“With all of this music, they don’t usually come in knowing it before we play it. And that’s part of what’s fun about a youth orchestra, is you can feel that discovery in the enthusiasm they bring to the performance. They’re falling in love with this music for the first time,” he said.
Part of familiarizing himself with the culture of San Antonio when Peters arrived from the East Coast 15 years ago was getting to know Emilio Navaira’s music.
“I spent hours listening to songs and just falling in love with melodies without even really knowing which ones were the hits,” he said. Peters began pitching the idea of a Navaira tribute concert to the San Antonio Symphony in 2017, a show that finally occurred in 2019 under the direction of his baton and with Navaira’s sons performing.
“It was a very successful program,” he said. “We had a big enthusiastic crowd and people had a great time.”
Encore performance
The concert on Sunday will be an encore of that concert, Peters said, but with some changes to the program and with the addition of singer Destiny Navaira, daughter of the late Emilio Navaira’s brother Raul “Raulito” Navaira.
“She’s gonna join us on stage, but I won’t say for what song,” Diego Navaira said, wanting to keep a surprise for the audience.
Emilio Navaira released 22 albums. Rather than focus on one record, the YOSA Classic Albums Live concert will draw from Navaira’s entire songbook.
“It’s going to be a setlist that spans his whole career from the first record to the last, and even touching on the two country records that he made,” Emilio Navaira said. “It’s pretty much a greatest hits.”
They declined to reveal in advance the deep cuts selected by themselves and Peters, but said audiences can expect to hear such hits as the country crossover “Take It From Someone Who Knows,” and the 1996 single “Mundo Perfecto” that they never had a chance to perform with him onstage but played together on acoustic guitars at home.
Now, audiences will get a glimpse of the family dynamic that established the Navaira name. “It’s more than paying tribute to the music,” Emilio Navaira said. “It’s also paying tribute to the lessons he taught us, how to be in a touring band, how to make a living playing music … how to treat every show like it’s your last.”
His brother added, “Me and Emilio wouldn’t be the musicians we are without him.”
Tickets for the Viva Emilio concert are available from $22.50 to $55 through the Tobin Center website.
