THE FIVE MOONS OF LORCA

From: Berkeley, California. LA Opera: The Five Moons of Lorca (2020, Digital Short); The Last Dream of Frida and Diego (2023).

Currently serving as Composer-in-Residence with the storied Philadelphia Orchestra and included in The Washington Post's list of the most significant women composers in history (August, 2017), composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank has always had identity at the center of her music. Born in 1972 to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Gabriela explores her multicultural heritage through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Gabriela has traveled extensively throughout South America in creative exploration.  Her music often reflects not only her own personal experience as a multi-racial Latina, but also refract her studies of Latin American cultures, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her own.

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;  La Llorona (The Crying Woman): Tone Poem for Viola and Orchestra; and Concertino Cusqueño (Concertino in the Cusco style).  Gabriela's compositions also reflect her virtuosity as a pianist — when not composing, she is a sought-after performer, specializing in contemporary repertoire.

In 2020, Gabriela was a recipient of the prestigious 25th anniversary Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanity category with an unrestricted cash prize of $250,000, a meaningful portion of which was donated by Gabriela to the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. The award recognized Gabriela for breaking gender, disability, and cultural barriers in the classical music industry, and for her work as an activist on behalf of emerging composers of all demographics and aesthetics.  

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 50 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), “glorious” (Los Angeles Times) and “a magical world premiere” (Wall Street Journal). Gabriela is regularly commissioned by luminaries such as cellist Yo Yo Ma, the King’s Singers, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano with guitarist Manuel Barrueco, and conductors Marin Alsop and  Yannick Nézet-Séguin.  She has also received orchestral commissions and performances from leading American orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony.  Before her current residency with the Philadelphia Orchestra for which she will compose the 45-minute Picaflor (Hummingbird), in 2017 she completed her four-year tenure as composer-in-residence with the Detroit Symphony under conductor 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.  

Gabriela’s most recent premieres have been Pachamama Meets an Ode for chorus and orchestra commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and unveiled at Carnegie Hall under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Seguín; Haillí-Serenata for Chicago Symphony under the baton of Andrés Orozco-Estrada; Las Cinco Lunas de Lorca (“The five moons of Lorca”) commissioned by LA Opera; 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; and Suite Mestiza, a large-scale work for solo violin premiered by Movses Pogossian.   

In the season of 2022/23, co-commissioners San Diego Opera and San Francisco Opera premiered Gabriela’s first opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego (“The last dream of Frida and Diego”), utilizing words by her frequent collaborator Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz. El último sueño de Frida y Diego, which was produced at LA Opera in 2023 and will be staged in a new production by the Metropolitan Opera in the 2025/26 season, was described by The New Yorker as revealing “a significant music-theatre talent. Frank has mastered the intricacies of operatic construction on her first attempt, producing a confident, richly imagined score that is free of lapses and longueurs. Let’s hope that more opera commissions come her way.” Other upcoming projects include recording The Conquest Requiem with the Nashville Symphony under the baton of Giancarlo Guerrero for the Naxos Records label followed by a staged performance at the Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 2024; a new work with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for voice and orchestra with texts by the award-winning scientist/birder/poet J. Drew Lanham; a string quartet for the Fry Street Quartet; and others.  
 
Gabriela 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. Músic Mestiza, created by filmmaker Aric Hartvig, received an Emmy nomination for best Documentary Feature in 2015.  

Civic outreach is an essential part of Gabriela’s work. She has volunteered extensively in hospitals and prisons, with her current focus on enhancing the music program within the Anderson Valley Unified School District, a rural district of modest means with a large Latino population in Boonville, California.  

Gabriela is also a climate activist, co-authoring articles on climate action within the music industry for Chamber Music America Magazine and creating a Climate Commitment for GLFCAM.  She has also written about her hearing loss as a guest columnist with The New York Times, “I think Beethoven encoded his deafness in his music.” 

In 2017, Gabriela founded the award-winning Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music whose history and mission can be found here. 

Gabriela 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 Bolcom and Leslie Bassett and piano with Logan Skelton. She currently resides in Boonville, a small rural town in the Anderson Valley, with her husband Jeremy on their mountain farm, has a second home in her native Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has traveled extensively in Andean South America.  
 
Gabriela is a member of Wise Music/G. Schirmer’s prestigious roster of artists, exclusively managed and published.  

From: Matanzas, Cuba; Miami, Florida. LA Opera: he is the librettist of The Five Moons of Lorca (a 2020 Digital Short) and The Last Dream of Frida and Diego (2023).

In 2003, Nilo Cruz won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Anna in the Tropics, for which he also received a Tony Award nomination. His numerous awards include those from the Kennedy Center Fund, American Theatre Critics and the Humana Festival for New American Plays; as well as grants from the NEA and the Rockefeller Foundation. 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. His work has been seen at South Coast Rep, Mark Taper Forum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Washington D.C.’s Studio Theatre and New York’s Public Theater; and around the world. He wrote the libretti for The Conquest Requiem and The Santos Oratorio for Gabriela Lena Frank and for Jimmy López’s Bel Canto for Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Matthew Diamond is the director of LA Opera's 2020 Digital Short The Five Moons of Lorca and the company's 2021 streaming presentation of Oedipus Rex, as well as numerous live simulcasts. 

He began his critically acclaimed career as a director and dance choreographer for film and television in the mid-1980s. He began directing episodes of shows like The 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.

From: Montreal, Canada. LA Opera: Wonderful Town (2016); The Five Moons of Lorca (2020); Oedipus Rex (2021); The Three Women of Jerusalem (2022); Moses (2023).

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.

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 with the company.

Grant Gershon, Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, has been hailed for his adventurous and bold artistic leadership, and for eliciting technically precise and expressive performances from musicians. The Los Angeles Times has said the Chorale has become "the best-by-far chorus in America" under Gershon, a reflection on both his programming and performances. In 2022, Chorus America honored Gershon with the Michael Korn Founders Award for Development of the Professional Choral Art in recognition of his career's work.
 
Gershon has led more than 200 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 such compoers as Michael Abels, John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Jeff Beal, Eve Beglarian, Billy Childs, Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, Ricky Ian Gordon, Shawn Kirchner, David Lang, Morten Lauridsen, Steve Reich, Ellen Reid, Christopher Rouse, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Chinary Ung. 

Gershon is committed to increasing representation in the choral repertoire, and in 2020 he announced that the 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 Chorale opened the famed Salzburg Festival with Lagrime di San Pietro, directed by Peter Sellars. Gershon and the 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.”

As resident conductor of LA Opera, Gershon 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 subsequently conducted the world premiere of Daniel Catan's Il Postino, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Florencia en el Amazonas, Wonderful Town, The Tales of Hoffmann, and The Pearl Fishers, among other productions. 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 2019. Gershon and Adams have an enduring friendship and professional relationship that 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 world premiere performances of Adams’s 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 the 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 Grammy-nominated recordings of Sweeney Todd (New York Philharmonic Special Editions) and Ligeti’s Grand Macabre (Sony Classical); commercial CDs with the 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 Chorale’s 50th Season Celebration recording and Festival of Carols. He has also led the 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 USC Thornton School of Music in 2002 and received the USC Alumni Merit Award in 2017.