Gabriela Lena Frank is a Californian of Lithuanian-Jewish and Peruvian heritage, and she’s writing some of the most interesting music today.



Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout,” a sensational piece written for the Chiara that uses every imaginable string technique. Gabriela Lena Frank's musical influences come from her own polyglot background. Her mother is Peruvian, her father is descended from Lithuanian Jews, and she grew up in Berkeley, California. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps worker in Peru in the 1960s.

Gabriela Lena Frank is a Californian of Lithuanian-Jewish and Peruvian heritage, and she’s writing some of the most interesting music today.

One night, two quartets: The only thing they have in common is the number four
By PAUL HORSLEY
The Kansas City Star

Two concerts in one night: How did I do it?

Saturday’s concerts by the Zehetmair and Chiara string quartets were not just radically different from each other, they were both dramatic departures from the standard quartet concert.

The Zehetmair performed on the Friends of Chamber Music series at the Folly Theater, and as such it was a more formal affair than the Chiara’s, an amplified affair for a hundred denizens of the Brick.

Nevertheless the European-based Friends group, founded by Austrian virtuoso violinist Thomas Zehetmair in 1994, does things that no other quartet does.

First of all, they play everything from memory, which means there are no music stands in the middle of their chair formation, and thus they sit much closer to each other.

It’s hard to overestimate the greater intimacy of ensemble this creates, which they heighten by actually having the first violin and violist (stage right) facing more or less directly the second violin and cellist (stage left), instead of half-turned toward the audience.

A further gain from playing from memory is that they don’t have to pause between movements for a page turn if they don’t want to. The haunting slow movement of Mozart’s G-major Quartet, K. 156, came so quickly after the opening movement it seemed “of a piece” with it, in an interesting and not immediately explainable way.

[Excerpt]

Fortunately the best was to come: Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout,” a sensational piece written for the Chiara that uses every imaginable string technique.

Frank is a Californian of Lithuanian-Jewish and Peruvian heritage, and she’s writing some of the most interesting music today. I’d been hankering to hear this suite live for years, and the Brick was the perfect venue.

It’s a wild ride through Latin America, a wildly colored evocation of flutes, message runners, funeral mourners, cowboys and countryside festivals. The Chiara embraced it completely, and for me it was the biggest thrill of the night.

Links to Related Topics (Tags):

Headlines: November, 2007; Figures; Peace Corps Peru; Directory of Peru RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Peru RPCVs; Music

When this story was posted in December 2007, this was on the front page of PCOL:




Peace Corps Online The Independent News Forum serving Returned Peace Corps Volunteers

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