The inaugural Digital Short is an exciting mix of opera, dance, poetry and film.
LA Opera's series of newly commissioned music videos, Digital Shorts, kicks off with The Five Moons of Lorca (Las cinco lunas de Lorca) by the groundbreaking Gabriela Lena Frank, one of today's most popular composers.
Featuring an original text by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, the piece was filmed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, marking LA Opera's first return to that stage since March. Featuring astonishing choreography and performance by dancer Irene Rodríguez, it takes inspiration from the assassination of poet Federico García Lorca at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The Five Moons of Lorca conveys the beauty of García Lorca’s life as well as its tragic end, while serving as a commentary for the dangers of political and cultural intolerance
Composer Gabriela Lena Frank creates "high-spirited pieces full of vibrant colors, slicing rhythms and volatile textures that contract, swell and warp"
Creators
- Composer
- Gabriela Lena Frank
- Librettist
- Nilo Cruz
- Filmmaker
- Matthew Diamond
Gabriela Lena Frank
Composer
From: Berkeley, California. LA Opera: The Five Moons of Lorca (2020, Digital Short, debut).
Moreover, she writes, "There's usually a story line behind my music; a scenario or character." While the enjoyment of her works can be obtained solely from her music, the composer's program notes enhance the listener's experience, for they describe how a piano part mimics a marimba or pan-pipes, or how a movement is based on a particular type of folk song, where the singer is mockingly crying. Even a brief glance at her titles evokes specific imagery: Leyendas (Legends): An Andean Walkabout; Cuentos Errantes (Wandering Songs); and La Llorona (The Crying Woman): Tone Poem for Viola and Orchestra. Frank’s compositions also reflect her virtuosity as a pianist — when not composing, she is a sought-after performer, specializing in contemporary repertoire.
Winner of a Latin Grammy and nominated for Grammys as both composer and pianist, Gabriela also holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and a USA Artist Fellowship given each year to fifty of the country’s finest artists. Her work has been described as "crafted with unself-conscious mastery” (Washington Post), "brilliantly effective” (New York Times), "a knockout” (Chicago Tribune) and "glorious” (Los Angeles Times). Gabriela Lena Frank is regularly commissioned by luminaries such as cellist Yo Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, the King’s Singers, and the Kronos Quartet, as well as by the talents of the next generation such as conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin of the Metropolitan Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra. She has received orchestral commissions and performances from leading American orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony. In 2017, she completed her four-year tenure as composer-in-residence with the Detroit Symphony under Maestro Leonard Slatkin, composing Walkabout: Concerto for Orchestra, as well as a second residency with the Houston Symphony under Andrés Orozco-Estrada for whom she composed the Conquest Requiem, a large-scale choral/orchestral work in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Frank’s most recent premiere is Apu: Tone Poem for Orchestra commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by the National Youth Orchestra of the United States under the baton of conductor Marin Alsop. In the season of 2019/20, Fort Worth Opera will premiered Frank’s first opera, The Last Dream of Frida (with a subsequent performance by co-commissioner San Diego Opera) utilizing words by her frequent collaborator, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz.
Gabriela Lena Frank is the subject of several scholarly books including the W.W. Norton Anthology The Musics of Latin America; Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers (Scarecrow Press); and In her Own Words (University of Illinois Press). She is also the subject of several PBS documentaries including Compadre Huashayo regarding her work in Ecuador composing for the Orquestra de Instrumentos Andinos comprised of native highland instruments; and Música Mestiza, regarding a workshop she led at the University of Michigan composing for a virtuoso septet of a classical string quartet plus a trio of Andean panpipe players. Música Mestiza, created by filmmaker Aric Hartvig, received an Emmy Nomination for best Documentary Feature in 2015.
Civic outreach is an essential part of Frank’s work. She has volunteered extensively in hospitals and prisons, with a recent project working with deaf African-American high school students in Detroit who rap in sign language. In 2017, Frank founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, a non-profit training institution that offers emerging composers short-term retreats at Gabriela’s two farms in Mendocino County, California. Over two visits, participants receive artistic and professional mentorship from Gabriela as well as readings of works in progress by guest faculty master performers in advance of the works' public world premieres at the academy. In support of arts citizenship, the Academy also pairs participant composers and faculty performers with underrepresented rural communities in a variety of projects such as working with students at the Anderson Valley Junior/Senior High enrolled in basic music composition class.
During the 2018/19 season, Frank lead four composer residencies across the U.S., including performances of her recent works as well as large-scale commissions: composer-in-residence with Philadelphia Orchestra through 2021, visiting artist-in-residence with Vanderbilt University, a composer residency with the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra, and is the featured composer for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Music in Color concert series. In 2017, Frank founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music in Boonville, California, which provides mentorship, readings-to-premieres residencies, and commissions for emerging composers from diverse backgrounds in addition to fostering public school programs in low-arts rural public schools.
Frank attended Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she earned a B.A. (1994) and M.A. (1996). She studied composition with Sam Jones, and piano with Jeanne Kierman Fischer. At the University of Michigan, where she received a D.M.A. in composition in 2001, Gabriela studied with William Albright, William Bolcom, Leslie Bassett, and Michael Daugherty, and piano with Logan Skelton. She currently resides in Boonville, a small rural town in the Anderson Valley of northern California, with her husband Jeremy on their mountain farm, has a second home in her native Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area, and travels frequently in South America.
Gabriela Lena Frank's music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer, Inc.
Nilo Cruz
Librettist
From: Matanzas, Cuba; Miami, Florida. LA Opera: The Five Moons of Lorca (2020, Digital Short, debut).
Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz gained national prominence in 2003 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play Anna in the Tropics, for which he also received a Tony Award nomination. The immigrant experience is a common theme in many of Cruz's plays and he has become known for his ability to successfully weave strains of magic realism and other literary traditions into his works.
In addition to the Pulitzer, he has received numerous awards, including those from the Kennedy Center Fund, American Theatre Critics and the Humana Festival for New American Plays; as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.
His plays include Dancing on Her Knees; A Park in Our House; Two Sisters and a Piano; A Bicycle Country; Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams; Lorca in a Green Dress; Beauty of the Father; Hurricane; and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, as well as translations of Doña Rosita the Spinster; The House of Bernarda Alba; Life Is a Dream; and ¡Ay, Carmela! His work has been seen at numerous theaters around the country including, among others, South Coast Rep, the Mark Taper Forum, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Washington D.C.’s Studio Theatre and New York’s Public Theater; and around the world in Canada, England, France, Australia, Germany, Belarus, Costa Rica, Colombia, Japan and Spain.
As a lyricist, he is a frequent collaborator with composer Gabriela Lena Frank. He has written the libretti for The Conquest Requiem and The Santos Oratorio for Ms. Frank and the text of orchestral songs, La Centinela y la paloma. Cruz also adapted Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel Bel Canto for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, with Peruvian composer Jimmy López and recently premiered the oratorio Dreamers by López at Cal Performance in Berkeley, California.
Cruz, who received an M.F.A. from Brown University and an honorary doctorate degree from Whittier College, has twice previously served as a playwright-in-residence: In 2000, for the McCarter Theatre, in Princeton, N.J., and in 2001 for the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, which commissioned Anna in the Tropics. Cruz has also taught drama at Yale, Brown and the University of Iowa. During the 2019/20 academic year, he was the Hearst Theater Lab Initiative Distinguished Visiting Playwright-in-Residence at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. He is a member of the New Dramatists.
Matthew Diamond
Filmmaker
Matthew Diamond began his critically acclaimed career as a director and dance choreographer for film and television in the mid-'80s. He began directing episodes of shows like Guiding Light, Designing Women and A Different World before gaining more extensive work directing episodes of Family Ties and Day by Day in the late 1980s. He continued to direct television shows in the early 1990s and even directed 21 episodes of the classic sitcom The Golden Girls before embarking on his crowning artistic achievement later in the decade.
In 1998 he put his experiences as a dance choreographer and television director to good use in the documentary Dancemaker. The documentary was nominated for an Academy Award in 1999 and propelled Diamond's directorial career into the 2000s. He enjoyed further success with dance-inspired programming when he earned heaping critical praise, which included Emmy and Directors Guild Awards, for his work directing Great Performances: Dance in America. He returned to more sitcoms on television afterwards by directing episodes of Scrubs, That's So Raven, and Gilmore Girls. He continued to intertwine dance, music, comedy, and dramatic storytelling with 2008's Camp Rock and, a year later, began directed episodes of the hit reality show So You Think You Can Dance.
Other recent credits include The Wiz Live!, extensive work for Great Performances at the Met and Live from Lincoln Center, and numerous LA Opera simulcasts.
Artists
- Choreographer / Dancer
- Irene Rodríguez
- Chorus Director
- Grant Gershon
- Lighting
- Azra King-Abadi
- Countertenor
- Jacob Ingbar
- Pianist
Irene Rodríguez
Choreographer / Dancer
Irene Rodríguez is the leading figure of Spanish dance in Cuba.
She is a first dancer, professor, and choreographer, and has worked as a dancer and choreography consultant for the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. She earned a Theater Arts Degree and a Master’s Degree in Theoretical Studies of Dance. She has performed at the Montalvo Art Center, the Museum of Latin American Art, The Moore Theatre, The Joyce Theatre, WTTW Studios, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, and the Kennedy Center. She founded her own company, Compañía Irene Rodríguez, and the Irene Rodríguez Spanish Dance Academy. Awards include First Prize in the VIII Iberoamerican Choreography Competition; the Choreography Award (UNEAC); the Excellence Award (International Ballet Schools Competition); inclusion in The Book of Honor of the Gran Teatro de la Habana; the Medalla Iberoamericana; the Audience and UNEAC Award and the Order Isabel La Católica. She is the Artistic Director of the International Festival “La Huella de España.”
Learn more at IreneRodriguezCompania.com.
Grant Gershon
Chorus Director
From: Alhambra, California. LA Opera: Resident Conductor from 2012 to 2022, he made his LAO conducting debut with La Traviata (2009). He has conducted 15 productions to date including, most recently, The Magic Flute in December 2019.
Hailed for his adventurous and bold artistic leadership, and for eliciting technically precise and expressive performances from musicians, Grammy Award-winner Grant Gershon celebrated his 20th anniversary as Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the 2021/22 season. The Los Angeles Times has said the Master Chorale "has become the most exciting chorus in the country under Grant Gershon,” a reflection on both his programming and performances.
During his tenure, Gershon has led more than 200 Master Chorale performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall in programs encompassing a wide range of choral music, from the early pillars of the repertoire to contemporary compositions. He has led world premiere performances of major works by John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Eve Beglarian, Billy Childs, Gabriela Lena Frank, Ricky Ian Gordon, Shawn Kirchner, David Lang, Morten Lauridsen, Steve Reich, Ellen Reid, Christopher Rouse, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Chinary Ung, among many others.
Gershon is committed to increasing representation in the choral repertoire, and in 2020 he announced that the Master Chorale will reserve at least 50% of each future season for works by composers from historically excluded groups in classical music.
In July 2019, Gershon and the Master Chorale opened the famed Salzburg Festival with Lagrime di San Pietro, directed by Peter Sellars. The Salzburg performances received standing ovations and rave reviews from such outlets as the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which called Lagrime “painfully beautiful” (Schmerzliche schön). Gershon and the Master Chorale debuted the production in Los Angeles in 2016 and began touring the world with it in 2018. In its review of the premiere of Lagrime, the Los Angeles Times noted that the production “is a major accomplishment for the Master Chorale, which sang and acted brilliantly. It is also a major accomplishment for music history.”
He was the Resident Conductor of LA Opera from 2012 to 2022, and in this capacity conducted the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha in November 2018. He made his acclaimed debut with the company with La Traviata in 2009 and has subsequently conducted productions including Il Postino, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Florencia en el Amazonas, Wonderful Town, The Tales of Hoffmann and The Pearl Fishers. In 2017, he made his San Francisco Opera debut conducting the world premiere of John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West directed by Peter Sellars, who also wrote the libretto, and made his Dutch National Opera debut with the same opera in March 2019. Gershon and Adams have an enduring friendship and professional relationship which began 27 years ago in Los Angeles when Gershon played keyboards in the pit for Nixon in China at LA Opera. Since then, Gershon has led the world premiere performances of Adams’ theater piece I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, premiered his two-piano piece Hallelujah Junction (with Gloria Cheng), and conducted performances of Harmonium, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, El Niño, The Chairman Dances, and choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer.
In New York, Gershon has appeared at Carnegie Hall and at the historic Trinity Wall Street, and he has performed on the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center and the Making Music series at Zankel Hall. Other major appearances include performances at the Ravinia, Aspen, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Salzburg, and Vienna festivals, the South American premiere of LA Opera’s production of Il Postino in Chile, and performances with the Baltimore Symphony and the Coro e Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Torino in Turin, Italy. He has worked closely with numerous conductors, including Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, James Conlon, Gustavo Dudamel, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle, and his mentor, Esa-Pekka Salonen.
His discography includes the 2022 Grammy Award-winning recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 8 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well as Grammy–nominated recordings of Sweeney Todd (New York Philharmonic Special Editions) and Ligeti’s Grand Macabre (Sony Classical); six commercial CDs with the Master Chorale, including Glass-Salonen (RCM), You Are (Variations) (Nonesuch), Daniel Variations (Nonesuch), A Good Understanding (Decca), Miserere (Decca), and the national anthems (Cantaloupe Music); and two live-performance albums, the Master Chorale’s 50th Season Celebration recording and Festival of Carols. He has also led the Master Chorale in performances for several major motion pictures soundtracks, including, at the request of John Williams, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. Gershon was named Outstanding Alumnus of the Thornton School of Music in 2002 and received the USC Alumni Merit Award in 2017.
Azra King-Abadi
Lighting
From: Montreal, Canada. LA Opera: Wonderful Town (2016); Oedipus Rex (2021).
Azra King-Abadi is a theater designer specializing in lighting and costume design. She is currently based in Los Angeles, after moving here from Montreal.
She trained at Concordia University and received her BFA in Fine Arts, Specialization in Theatre Design. Later she attended Cal State Long Beach where she received her MFA in Lighting Design. After graduation, she began working as a freelance designer in the Los Angeles area and took over the position of Assistant Lighting Designer for LA Opera. She is a member of United Scenic Artists, union local 829. She has worked at several prestigious companies such as the LA Opera, Opera Santa Barbara, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Long Beach Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Central City Opera, as well as many prestigious educational programs and theatre companies in California. Before moving to Los Angeles she mainly designed costumes in her hometown of Montreal. She designed for exciting young companies such as Tableau D’Hote and Gravy Bath Productions.
Azra found herself drawn to theater, as an environment for collaboration and the ability to mix so many different media.
Her design approach focuses on the emotional truth of the moment is order to tell the story in an effective way and bring the audience along on the journey. She enjoys the expressionistic style and tries to represent a character’s internal psychology on the stage. She has been able to do this in a variety of ways since she has worked in varying theaters with a wide range of capacities and/or budgets. She is always excited by the prospect of creating new and exciting work, and participating in the collaborative process.
Learn more at AzraKingAbadi.com.
Jacob Ingbar
Countertenor
From: Minneapolis, Minnesota. LA Opera: Mercury in The Death of Orpheus (2020); Colin in The Anonymous Lover (2020); soloist in the Digital Short The Five Moons of Lorca (2020); Angel in The Three Women of Jerusalem. He is an alumnus of the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program (2020-22).
American countertenor Jacob Ingbar made his professional debut at age ten as a soloist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and has performed throughout North America and Europe ever since.
In 2023, he will make his San Francisco Opera debut as Leonardo in El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego by Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz.
In 2020, Jacob was slated to debut at the Glimmerglass Festival as Il mago cristiano in Handel’s Rinaldo and with the NDR Radiophilharmonie as Tolomeo in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Hanover, Germany. Recently, he was the alto soloist in Bach’s Magnificat with the Capella Regio Polona in Warsaw.
Jacob has performed at the Aldebugh Festival, Minnesota Opera, Aspen Music Festival, Guthrie Theatre, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Polish National Opera, among other venues. He can be heard as the alto soloist in Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms on the album Psalms and Songs featuring the Exultate Choir and Orchestra.
He is an alumnus of the Juilliard School, the Britten-Pears Young Artist Program, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ Gerdine Young Artist Program, the Glimmerglass Opera Young Artist Program and Houston Grand Opera’s Young Artists Vocal Academy. He pursued his graduate studies at Rice University under the tutelage of Dr. Stephen King and previously received scholarship support from the George London and Gerda Lissner Foundations.
Pianist
Notes, Text & Translation
Notes, Text & Translation
"Utilizing an original text by my longtime collaborator playwright Nilo Cruz, Las cinco lunas de Lorca (The Five Moons of Lorca) lyrically describes the shooting death of dramatist Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) at the hands of Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Hints of Spanish folksong, which García Lorca passionately championed contrary to the decree of the Franco dictatorship, are featured throughout."—Gabriela Lena Frank
(Scroll down for English translation.)
LAS CINCO LUNAS DE LORCA
¡Ay noche de agracio!
¡Ay noche de pañuelo roto!
Cerca de Granada
llevan al poeta.
Cerca de Granada
avanza la muerte.
Y Lorca cuenta
cinco lunas heridas.
Con los ojos vendados,
anda en linea recta.
Recuerda que la vida
corre con el fuego...
y la muerte con la escarcha.
Y debe mirar
la muerte
como un destello:
Un golbo de rosas desbocadas.
¡Un disparo!
¡Otro disparo!
¡Y otro...!
En un caballo
(¡Ay, que noche tan breve!)
de aguas negras,
(¡Ay, que noche tan larga!)
el poeta se enfrenta
(¡Ay, que noche sin brazos!)
con los asesinos.
(¡Ay, que noche sin Dios!)
Matar a un hombre
en conocerlo íntimamente.
Y cada noche de sus vidas,
los asesinos deben desvestir
el cuerpo de los muertos
y contemplar
el infinito hilito
de sangre:
El torrente de palabras
que sigue fluyendo
con la tinta
de una pluma verde.
THE FIVE MOONS OF LORCA
Oh, night of grievance!
Oh, night of torn handkerchief!
Near Granada,
the poet has been taken.
Near Granada,
death approaches.
And Lorca counts
five wounded moons.
With his eyes blindfolded,
he walks in a straight line.
He recalls that life
gallops with fire...
and death with the frost.
And he must look
at death
as a blaze:
A blast of unruly roses.
A gunshot!
Another gunshot!
And another...!
On a horse
(Oh, such a brief night!)
of black water,
(Oh, such a long night!)
the poet confronts
(Oh, such a night without arms!)
the killers |
(Oh, such a night without God!)
To kill a man
is to know him intimately.
And every night of their lives,
the killers must undress
the body of the dead
and contemplate
the infinite little stream
of blood:
The gush of words
that continues to flow
from the ink
of a green pen.
This version of Las cinco lunas de Lorca was commissioned by LA Opera.