Christian Vasquez et l'Orchestre du Capitole ont à leur tour exalté les beautés d'un chef-d'oeuvre de la musique russe du XXe siècle: la Cinquième symphonie de Prokofiev.  Le chef vénézuélien, entendu en octobre à la tête du jeune Orchestre Teresa Carreno, sait tirer le meilleur de tous les pupitres de l’orchestre pour livrer une version de la partition riche de timbres et habitée.  L’Adagio était à la fois poignant et implacable.

Anne-Marie Chouchan, La Dépèche du Midi, 16 January 2013

El sistema, Venezuela's revolutionary music education programme, has been running for decades, but has only registered internationally over the past five years.
One of its latest products is Christian Vásquez, a 26-year-old conductor who is already making waves.
[…] From the lovely meandering cor anglais solo that set things moving, Berlioz's Roman Carnival overture seemed to gather its momentum from Vásquez's body.  He is a hypermobile conductor, bouncing merrily, gesturing wildly, but with firm control of the direction.
[...] For Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony (the Pathétique), as for the Berlioz, Vásquez did without a score.
From the moment the sinister bassoon was answered by ominous violas, this was a reading of palpable tension.  Even the jaunty dance of the second movement was infected with unease, while there was a manic nerviness in the third movement march that seemed to prefigure Shostakovich. Tchaikovsky doesn't always sound this contemporary, and it was thrilling. Evening Standard, 1 July 2011

***** Conductor Christian Vasquez moved the Allegro [of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony] along at a thrusting pace, with the syncopations bouncing across the bar-lines; he found a wide range of dynamic contrasts in the slow movement, and wove pianissimo spells in the Scherzo; this is a man who knows exactly what he wants, and how to get it.  And this is an orchestra whose cleanness of sound belies both its youth and its gargantuan size. Michael Church, The Independent, 15 October 2010

***** Vásquez shaped everything with a mature, unostentatious hand
[...] Much of the credit must go to the orchestra’s young conductor Christian Vásquez, who shaped everything with an impressively mature, unostentatious hand. Ivan Hewitt, The Telegraph, 13 October 2010

***** It is less the sense of refinement than that of struggle which is the essential ingredient here.  Indeed, if authenticity in music refers, as it should, to capturing the spirit in which a work is conceived, then I have rarely heard the hard-won triumph which concludes each work sound more authentic.  And given that Beethoven's subject, no less than Prokofiev's, was man's ability to take his so-called destiny and shake it by the scruff of the neck until it yields to his will, there can be few orchestras better suited to it than this.  Bravo! Guy Dammann, The Guardian, 13 October 2010