Vijay Gupta – violinist, author, and founder of Street Symphony – brings a practice rooted in listening as a form of leadership: an understanding, developed through years of community performance, that music reveals how people adapt, endure, and find meaning together. Hailed as “a visionary violinist and a radical thinker in the classical music world” (The New Yorker), Gupta is a 2018 MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant recipient and an internationally-recognized leader in music and social advocacy. Gupta reflects on this journey in his memoir Restrung (coming out on June 9, 2026), which traces his path from major orchestras to the shelters and community rooms of Skid Row.
La Marisoul (born Eva Marisol Hernandez) is a singer, songwriter, and actress, with a unique voice shaped by Olvera Street boleros, rancheras, and the living tradition of music as a communal act. As the lead singer for La Santa Cecelia, La Marisoul has performed at Walt Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, and holds the 2014 Grammy for Best Latin Rock Album.
Developed through a years-long collaboration between Vijay Gupta, Street Symphony, and Los Angeles-based Mexican folk musicians Son California (performing with La Marisoul), this project brings together selections from The Four Seasons with traditional son jarocho ones – including pieces such as La Caña and La Carretera – in newly created orchestrations. Rather than presenting these traditions side by side, the program interleaves them, allowing each to illuminate the other in real time.
The project grows out of shared experiences performing in community spaces across Los Angeles. Those performances shaped a way of working that centers listening, participation, and the understanding that music is not separate from the conditions of people’s lives.
In Vijay’s words: “In Vivaldi’s work, the violin traces the physical realities of heat, cold, wind, and storm, alongside scenes of labor, celebration, and rest drawn from everyday life. In son jarocho, songs like La Caña carry histories of land, labor, and endurance, shaped through generations of communal music-making. Both traditions engage directly with the natural world and with the human experience within it.
By bringing these forms together, the program does not seek contrast but recognition. The repetition and variation of son jarocho, and the cyclical structures embedded in Vivaldi’s music, reveal a shared sense of time as something lived—through work, through environment, and through one another.
This performance invites audiences to hear these connections as they unfold, not as an abstract idea, but as a lived encounter with sound, place, and the forces that shape both.”
La Marisoul Hernandez, lead vocals
Vijay Gupta, violin
Federico Zúñiga, bass
Laura Cambron, tarima
Victor Murillo, requinto vocals and jarana
Jorge Herrera, requinto vocals and jarana