About
Cellist Lourdes de la Peña has been blessed with amazing performance opportunities playing for celebrities, ambassadors, and on world-class stages.
Most notably, last summer she was one of three cellists asked to play at the Kennedy Center for John Williams' 90th Birthday Party Dinner attended by Stephen Spielberg and David Rubenstein, Chairman of the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) Board.
In 2018, she played for the Aspen Institute's Project Play Summit's Private Dinner featuring Kobe Bryant and the Stanley Cup.
Soon after, her string quartet was invited to play for a black tie event at the Washington National Masonic Memorial.
She has given private concerts at the Ambassador of Brazil's Residence to celebrate the country's Bicentennial Independence and highlight the music of Brazilian classical composers.
The Embassy of Argentina invited Lourdes's quartet to perform for elementary students who were visiting the embassy as part of their Embassy Adoption Program. Later that week, her quartet gave a concert at the Embassy of Colombia.
She has played at a private event for former Congresswoman Connie Morella. The Congresswoman requested her favorite Frank Sinatra songs. She enjoyed hearing them as much as we enjoyed playing them.
She has performed a number of times at the US Senate including an event hosted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service celebrating World Wildlife Day and the 50th anniversary of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) with Ivonne Higuero (Secretary-General of CITES) in attendance.
Her more recent performances range from playing in a cello ensemble at Carnegie Hall to a Handel's Messiah Concert in Pennsylvania where she played alongside Anne Martindale Williams, Principal Cellist of the Pittsburg Symphony and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and David Chan, the Concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera and Violin Professor at Juilliard.
While a student at Oberlin Conservatory, Lourdes's quartet performed for Latin American ambassadors and high ranking government officials at the Inter-American Defense Board. Her quartet hosted a fundraiser concert for the Children's Inn of the National Institute of Health.
In high school, Lourdes was a National Symphony Orchestra Youth Fellow at the Kennedy Center where she performed several times in the NSO's Concert Hall and on the Millennium Stage.
On behalf of the Kennedy Center's NSO in your Neighborhood Community Outreach Program, she brought music to DC schools. Among other opportunities, she played in a master class for world-famous Cello Soloist Alban Gerhardt.
As part of The Capitol Symphonic Youth Orchestra, Lourdes performed in front of 17,00 people as the Principal Cellist at the Microsoft Inspire International Convention.
Lourdes is now the Founder and Director of StringTime where she is fulfilling her dream of running a beginner strings camp that will inspire kids to learn to make beautiful music. She continues to teach privately both cello and piano while also studying cello with NSO Principal Cellist David Hardy and learning to play the Viola da Gamba with John Moran, the Historical Performance Chair at Peabody Conservatory.