New York–based composer inti figgis-vizueta braids a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools in Washington, DC, with direct Andean and Irish heritage and a deep connection to the land. “Her music feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn,” writes The Washington Post. figgis-vizueta’s work explores the transformative power of group improvisation and play, working to reconcile historical aesthetics and experimental practices with trans and Indigenous futures. Recent highlights include the Carnegie Hall premiere of her string quartet concerto, Seven Sides of Fire, written for the Attacca Quartet and American Composers Orchestra and conducted by Mei-Ann Chen; performances of Coradh (bending) by the Spoleto Festival, Podium festival, and Oregon Symphony; and the REDCAT premiere of her evening-length show Music for Transitions, created in collaboration with two-time Grammy Award–winning cellist Andrew Yee and praised as “thrilling” and “revolutionary” by I Care If You Listen. Recent and upcoming projects include clay songs for Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary, continued development of Earths to Come for vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, and a new piano concerto for Conrad Tao and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Matthias Pintscher.
seven sisters paint the earth is inspired by the relationship of rains and the harvest between Andean peoples and the star cluster, the Pleiades. Andean farmers gather each year in late June to forecast the rainfall of the coming season, reading the brightness and clarity of the sisters in the pre-dawn sky. From these readings, farmers know whether to plant their crops sooner or to wait later in the year. These traditional forms of forecasting have been confirmed as having scientific basis, as they respond to the years of drought caused by the atmospheric changes of El Niño. seven sisters paint the earthreflects these relationships between earth and the heavens through the seven players of Ensemble Connect and their chosen pathways in its many changing techniques and constellations of musical notation. By celebrating and bringing closer Indigenous knowledge, we open ourselves to seeing the wisdom imparted by the patterns of our own everyday lives and world.
—inti figgis-vizueta
A self-described “multi-racial Latina,” American composer Gabriela Lena Frank grew up in Berkeley, California, and studied at Rice University and the University of Michigan. Following in the footsteps of Béla Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, she has explored the cross-fertilization of cultures and musical idioms in works like the opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego, about the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, which the Metropolitan Opera has announced plans to stage in the 2025–2026 season. Her long-standing commitment to climate activism is exemplified by the choral-orchestral work Pachamama Meets an Ode, which Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2019. In 2017, she founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, which provides professional mentorship for emerging composers from diverse backgrounds and traditions. As the recipient of a 2020 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, Frank was recognized for “weaving Latin American influences into classical constructs and breaking gender, disability, and cultural barriers in classical music composition.”
Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout draws inspiration from the idea of mestizaje as envisioned by Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, where cultures can coexist without the subjugation of one by the other. As such, this piece mixes elements from the Western classical and Andean folk music traditions. “Toyos” depicts one of the most recognizable instruments of the Andes, the panpipe. One of the largest kinds is the breathy toyo, which requires great stamina and lung power, and is often played in parallel fourths or fifths. “Tarqueada” is a forceful and fast number featuring the tarka, a heavy wooden duct flute that is blown harshly in order to split the tone. Tarka ensembles typically also play in fourths and fifths. “Himno de Zampoñas” features a particular type of panpipe ensemble that divides up melodies through a technique known as hocketing. The characteristic sound of the zampoña panpipe is that of a fundamental tone blown fatly so that overtones ring out on top, hence the unusual scoring of double stops in this movement.
“Chasqui” depicts a legendary figure from the Inca period, the chasqui runner, who sprinted great distances to deliver messages between towns separated from one another by the Andean peaks. The chasqui needed to travel light. Hence, I take artistic license to imagine his choice of instruments to be the charango, a high-pitched cousin of the guitar, and the lightweight bamboo quena flute, both of which are featured in this movement. “Canto de Volorio” portrays another well-known Andean personality, a professional crying woman known as the llorona. Hired to render funeral rituals even sadder, the llorona is accompanied here by a second llorona and an additional chorus of mourning women (coro de mujeres). The chant Dies Irae is quoted as a reflection of the comfortable mix of Quechua Indian religious rites with those from Catholicism. “Coqueteos” is a flirtatious love song sung by gallant men known as romanceros. As such, it is direct in its harmonic expression, bold, and festive. The romanceros sing in harmony with one another against a backdrop of guitars, which I think of as a vendaval de guitarras (“storm of guitars”).
—Gabriela Lena Frank
Born in Havana, Tania León is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral workStride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music.Since then, she has been named a Kennedy Center honoree and was awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University. She currently serves as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s composer in residence and Carnegie Hall’s 2023–2024 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair. Upcoming commissions include works for the League of American Orchestras and flutist Claire Chase with The Crossing and text by Rita Dove.
A founding member and first music director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’sSonidos de las Américasfestivals, was new music advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and is the founder and artistic director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning, and advocacy organization for living composers.
A CUNY Professor Emerita,she was awarded a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, Chamber Music America’s 2022 National Service Award, and Harvard University’s 2022 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award. In 2023, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired her archive.
Scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon, De Memorias was commissioned by the Mexico City Woodwind Quintet and dedicated to the grand old man of Cuban music, Alfredo Diez Nieto, with whom León studied in Havana. She explains that the work “has the sensation of days gone by, of my own memories, so familiar that I know them ‘by memory.’” (De Memorias dates from 2000, 16 years before León returned to her homeland for the first time to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba at the Havana Festival of Contemporary Music.) The densely packed score illustrates León’s accessible modernist idiom, full of colorful timbres and jaunty Latin rhythms. In the composer’s words, “The internal movement of the piece contrasts sounds framed within a rhythmic atmosphere; and opposite them, an atmosphere that is completely free, giving the sensation of a dialogue between capricious imaginary resonances.”
The opening bars of De Memorias pit a terse, sharply accented rhythmic pattern in the oboe and horn against the flighty, freely measured gestures of the other instruments. These countervailing tendencies toward strict synchronicity on the one hand and controlled entropy on the other persist throughout the piece, resulting in two discrete musical tracks that intersect, collide, run parallel, and occasionally merge. León juxtaposes different groupings of instruments in fluid, continually changing combinations, while punctuating the score with repetitive ostinato figures that convey a fleeting sense of stability. A panoply of ornaments and special tonal effects—grace notes, glissandos, tremolos, flutter-tonguing, tone bending, and so forth—enhances the music’s fitful lyricism.
Beethoven cut his musical teeth in his native Bonn, a relatively small provincial capital whose cultural life offered limited scope for a prodigiously gifted and ambitious young musician. In late 1792, he burst onto the scene in cosmopolitan Vienna and spent the rest of the decade burnishing his reputation as a pianistic powerhouse; upon hearing him play, his fellow virtuoso Wenzel Tomaschek was so overwhelmed that he refused to touch his own instrument for several days. Beethoven’s first published opus, the three piano trios of 1795, presented his credentials as an up-and-coming composer eager to step outside the lengthy shadow cast by Joseph Haydn, with whom he had studied from late 1792 to early 1794. By 1800, his 30th year, the young tyro had an impressive clutch of masterpieces to his credit, including his First Symphony, three piano concertos, the six Op. 18 String Quartets, and the Op. 20 Septet for Winds and Strings.
The septet took its place alongside several other chamber works featuring wind instruments, including the early Octet, Op. 103 (which Beethoven had revamped as a string quintet in 1795), and the Quintet for Piano and Winds, Op. 16, of 1796. No doubt hoping to capture a wider market for the latter work, Beethoven arranged it as a quartet for piano and strings and published the two versions simultaneously in 1801. According to his secretary Ferdinand Ries, the composer played a prank on his colleagues during a performance of the quintet in Vienna in 1804. “In the last Allegro there are several holds before the theme is resumed. At one of these Beethoven suddenly began to improvise, took the Rondo for a theme and entertained himself and the others for a considerable time, but not the other players. They were displeased and Ramm [the oboist] even very angry. It was really very comical to see them, momentarily expecting the performance to be resumed, put their instruments to their mouths, only to put them down again. At length, Beethoven was satisfied and dropped into the Rondo. The whole company was transported with delight.”
The quintet’s slow, majestic preamble evokes the outdoorsy atmosphere of the wind serenades that were popular throughout 18th-century Europe. The lockstep motion of the unison opening, based on a triadic figure in dotted rhythm, gives way to more intimate, conversational interplay in the Allegro ma non troppo, with the five instruments (piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon) introducing thematic material by turns. Beethoven’s keyboard part doesn’t want for virtuosic brilliance, as illustrated by the cadenza-like passages toward the end of the movement, but on the whole the pianist is less soloist than first among equals. The Andante features a languidly arching cantabile melody in B-flat major, the sustained legato line festooned with florid, aria-like ornamentation. Although the plaintive countersubject in G minor highlights the reedy timbre of the oboe and bassoon, and the horn gets a solo turn a few moments later, the luminous slow movement is largely the pianist’s show. But Beethoven redresses the balance in the zesty, triple-time Rondo, confining the pianistic bravura to a brief chromatic flourish and some moderately flashy passagework.
—Harry Haskell