Michael Frank, from the Bronx, met mother Sabrina when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru. They married and moved to Berkeley, where he did post-graduate work, and became part of Cal's Mark Twain project. And that's where children Marcos and Gabriela were born, Gabriela in 1972.
Community Folk: Gabriela Lena Frank
By Clara Rae Genser
Contra Costa Times
Walnut Creek, Calif.
May 6, 2005
COMPOSER Gabriela Lena Frank, the newest and youngest addition to publisher G. Schirmer's prestigious roster of artists, attributes her talent and compositions, at least in part, to her ethnic heritage. She's Peruvian (with a Chinese great-grandparent) and Jewish.
Father Michael Frank, from the Bronx, met mother Sabrina when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru. They married and moved to Berkeley, where he did post-graduate work, and became part of Cal's Mark Twain project. And that's where children Marcos and Gabriela were born, Gabriela in 1972.
"There was always music in our home, and usually it was Peruvian folk music," she said. She also remembers sitting with grandmother Lena Frank at the piano, where they would create new melodies as they played together.
Frank soon showed talent as a composer. She has produced an impressive portfolio of music, much of it incorporating South American mythology, art, poetry and folk melodies into Western classical forms.
Her compositions have been hailed as works of "honesty and genius" (Springfield Union-News) and "unself-conscious craft and mastery"(Washington Post).
Born with a moderate-to-profound neurosensory hearing loss, Frank learned early to "hear" music as she sat beneath the piano and felt the vibrations as it was played. She said it is a wonderful way of hearing music and she still sometimes takes out her hearing aids and listens to the vibrations as she composes and/or practices at the piano. At a very young age she taught herself to lip-read, and she soon began wearing hearing aids. Amazingly, she was also born with perfect pitch.
Frank began playing music professionally while still in graduate school at the University of Michigan. Just a few weeks ago she performed at the Lincoln Center in New York.
She has recorded the complete solo piano and violin/piano compositions of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Leslie Bassett, and collaborated with Peruvian ethnomusicologist Raul Romero in recording the piano music of indigenous composers of coastal and Andean Peru. In the near future she will premiere several works written specifically for her by Evan Chambers, Richard Lavenda and Andrew Meade.
Asked about her first composition, Frank tells of being a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where, at 16, she wrote a string quartet in four movements that was just four minutes long. It was played by fellow students.
"Hearing it played made me realize that music would be my life," she says. And it has been, as she has composed everything from concerti, symphonies and tone poems to short pieces for singers and dancers. She is now doing research for an opera she plans to write.
Finishing her postgraduate work at Michigan, Frank was warned that the only way she would be heard would be if she moved to New York. However, she returned to the Bay Area, settling in Albany. Here she discovered and was discovered by the many fine musical organizations around her.
Frank has written or is writing music for small, local groups as well as the famed Kronos Quartet and the Brentano String Quartet. She has written a concerto for the cello-piano duo of David Finckel and Wu Han and guitarist Sharon Isbin, among others.
Her song cycle, "Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea" was performed at Carnegie Hall in 2004. Other works have earned raves, including "Three Latin American Dances" premiered by the Utah Symphony Orchestra. The Utah Orchestra recently released a CD of Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances," Bernstein's "Dances from Westside Story" and Gabriela Frank's "Three Latin American Dances." She speaks of her parents' joy seeing a CD featuring "Rachmaninoff, Bernstein and Frank."
It also is now part of the repertoire of several major orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony.
She will be in Brazil this spring, when her flute concerto will be played by the Orquestra Sinfonica da Bahia, and serves or has served as composer-in-residence with various organizations.
"I am blessed," she says.
