In Thursday’s (10/25) Philadelphia Inquirer, David Patrick Stearns writes about a new Gabriella Lena Frank work commissioned for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first season with music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. “The 40-year-old composer from Oakland, Calif., has been bubbling over with music since her childhood, so much that her new Concertino Cusqueño, which the orchestra will premiere Thursday at the Kimmel Center, is loaded with ideas that didn’t fit in past pieces and promise to lead to a dozen others. ‘It’s like playing pool where you set up your cue shot for the next one,’ she says, leafing through the score one recent morning in a park in Media, where she’s visiting her brother. ‘If this stuff works, I’ll be stealing these gems as jumping-off points for future pieces.’ … Peru seems to be her primary identity outside of her California upbringing. Frank has spent much time there and even reads Quechua, an indigenous Andean language. In her Concertino Cusqueño score, she points to a tune she picked up in Cusco and explains in detail how strange it is. … In the new piece, she’s fantasizing about taking the late British composer Benjamin Britten to Peru, which is what she does musically, seizing upon ideas from his Violin Concerto and making them hers.”
Posted October 25, 2012
