GABRIELA LENA FRANK

Website

Soon to finish her long tenure as Composer-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra with the premiere of Picaflor (Marin Alsop, conductor) in the spring of 2025, identity has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank’s music. Her exploration of her indigenous-Peruvian, Chinese, and Lithuanian heritages has placed her on the Washington Post’s list of the most significant women composers in history. More recently, her Spanish-language opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego, commissioned and premiered to sold-out audiences by San Diego Opera and San Francisco Opera in the 2022-2023 season, was hailed as a major landmark of contemporary opera, “[revealing] a significant music-theatre talent. Frank, a Berkeley native, has mastered the intricacies of operatic construction on her first attempt, producing a confident, richly imagined score that is free of lapses and longueurs.” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) The opera will see a new production at the Metropolitan Opera in the 2025-26 season. 

In 2017, Gabriela founded the award-winning, Mellon Foundation-supported Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (GLFCAM), a training institution held on her two rural properties in Boonville, CA for emerging composers from a broad array of demographics and aesthetics. 

 

Gabriela’s life as a cultural witness has been profiled in multiple PBS documentaries. She is newly featured in the documentary, Beethoven’s Nine, released internationally by Riddle Films in May 2024 and directed by Academy-nominated filmmaker, Larry Weinstein.

Photo: Mariah Tauger