World Premiere: July 19, 2017
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes with 3rd doubling English Horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings
Duration: 14 minutes

Gabriela Lena Frank

The compositions of Gabriela Lena Frank, born in Berkeley, California of Peruvian parents in 1972, incorporate elements of Latino/Latin American mythology, archeology, art, poetry and folk music into traditional Classical forms in works for opera, orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, chorus and vocal solo. In addition to the inaugural Sackler Music Composition Prize of the University of Connecticut in 2002, Frank has received many commissions, grants and awards and held residencies with orchestras, schools and festivals in North America and throughout Latin America; she is currently Composer-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra and a faculty member of the Cortona Sessions for New Music in Italy. Frank received the 2009 Latin Grammy Award for Best Classical Music Composition (Inca Dances) and a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Crossover Album as one of the composers who contributed to Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble 2011 CD, Off the Map. In 2017, she founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, a non-profit training institution that offers emerging composers short-term retreats at her farms in California, and was included in the Washington Post’s list of the “35 Most Significant Women Composers in History.” Born with a moderate-to-profound neurosensory hearing loss, Frank served as the keynote speaker at the national convention of the Association of Late-Deafened Adults in September 2005. Fort Worth Opera premiered Frank’s first opera, The Last Dream of Frida and Diego, with a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, in 2021; it enters the Metropolitan Opera’s repertory in May 2026.

Frank wrote of Apu, composed in 2017 for the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America and premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York by that ensemble, conducted by Marin Alsop, “In Andean Perú, spirits are said to inhabit rocks, rivers and mountain peaks with the intent of keeping a watchful eye on travelers passing through highland roads. The rarely seen Apu is one of the better-known spirits that is sometimes portrayed as a minor deity with a mischievous side. Simple folksong and a solemn prayer often successfully placate the Apu to ensure safe passage through the mountains. 

“Apu begins with a short folkloric song inspired by the agile ‘pinkillo’ flute, a small, slender instrument that packs well into the small bags of travelers who must travel light. It is followed by the extended haillí of the second movement, a prayer to the Apu, which flows without pause to the third movement, in which the Apu makes its brief but dazzling appearance before disappearing once again into the mountain peaks.”

©2024 Dr. Richard E. Rodda