"Latin American Masters" Symphony Biographies

Alberto Ginastera

Alberto Ginastera was the leading Argentinian composer of the twentieth century, as important in giving the Argentinian folk heritage a voice in art music as Bartók was in Hungary. Ginastera was born in Buenos Aires on April 11, 1916 (his father being Catalan, he preferred to pronounce his surname with a soft ‘g’). He studied music privately as a child, later enrolling at the National Conservatoire of Music in his home city. His first compositions date from his early youth; he was 22 when his Piezas infantiles for piano won first prize in a competition. The works which followed (e.g. the ballet Estancia) initially developed the nationalist tendencies announced in the Piezas infantiles.

In 1946–47, Ginastera spent a year in the United States on a Guggenheim fellowship, joining the teaching staff of the National Conservatory upon his return home. He was later the Dean of the Faculty of Musical Arts & Sciences at the Catholic University. His first opera, Don Rodrigo, was premiered to immediate acclaim in 1966 and was soon followed by two others, Bomarzo (1967) and Beatrix Cenci (1971). Bomarzo attracted attention through what Nicolas Slonimsky called ‘its unrestrained spectacle of sexual violence’ though, as Slonimsky further points out, it also ‘reveals extraordinary innovations in serial techniques, with thematic employment not only of different chromatic sounds but also of serial progressions of different intervals’. (A fourth opera, Barrabas, was unfinished at the time of his death.) In 1969, finding himself out of sympathy with the prevailing political climate in Argentina (indeed, he was twice ejected from his academic posts because of his protests against the repressive regime), Ginastera left the country, settling in Geneva with his second wife, the cellist Aurora Natola.

In the early 1950s, the nationalist element in his music gradually lost its dominance, and more explicitly modernist characteristics began to make their presence felt in what Ginastera called his ‘neo-expressionistic period’. He actively adopted the twelve-tone technique and his works also incorporated microtones and polytonality. By the time of his death, on June 25, 1983, his modernism had softened, and he began to look again at the tonality and folk-music inflexions of his early output.

Alberto Ginastera is published by Boosey & Hawkes.

Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes

Gabriela Lena Frank

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), identity has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank’s music. Born in Berkeley, California (September, 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.

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 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 is regularly commissioned by luminaries such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, the King’s Singers, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano with guitarist Manuel Barrueco, Brooklyn Rider, 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 Chronicles of the Picaflor (Hummingbird), 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.

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 developing the music school program at Anderson Valley High School, a rural public school of modest means with a large Latino population in Boonville, CA.

Gabriela is also a climate activist, co-authoring a regular column on climate action within the music industry for Chamber Music America Magazine and creating a Climate Initiative 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.”

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 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, 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.

Inocente Carreño

Inocente Carreño was a notable Venezuelan musician of the 20th century and was active until his death in 2016. Considered Venezuela’s most prolific composer, he also stood out as an educator. He was a pioneer in the inclusion of Venezuelan elements in academic music and was part of the stylistic “nationalist school”, represented by Antonio Estévez and Antonio Lauro, among others.

Inocente Carreño was born in Porlamar in the state of Nueva Esparta, Venezuela, on December 28, 1919. He was raised by his grandmother on Margarita Island. As a child, he studied under Lino Gutiérrez and, at age 13, he settled in Caracas, where he arranged and composed traditional Venezuelan and popular Latin American music. There, he entered the School of Music and Declamation of the Academy of Fine Arts in Caracas (now the José Ángel Lamas School of Music), where he was under the tutelage of Maestro Vicente Emilio Sojo. He was a singer in the Orfeón Lamas, as well as a trumpet and horn player in the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra.

In the forties, he devoted himself to compositions in classical style, with elements from Venezuelan folklore. In 1946 he graduated as a teacher and, as such, founded the Escuela Prudencio Esaá in 1970, and in 1989 he was appointed Director of the Escuela Superior de Música de Caracas.

He also participated in politics: he was a Senator of the Republic before the National Congress (current National Assembly), composed the music for the anthem of the Acción Democrática party to the words by the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco, and was Minister Counselor of Venezuela at UNESCO. For decades he was a member of the Board of Directors of the System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs of Venezuela (now known worldwide as El Sistema).

The most famous work by Inocente Carreño is undoubtedly Margariteña: Glosa Sinfónica, composed in 1954. Also prominent are the madrigal “Ask that sea”, four symphonic overtures, Suite for String Orchestra, Sinfonetta Satírica (that earned him the National Music Prize in 1963), Elegy for String Orchestra, as well as numerous symphonic poems, songs for voice and orchestra, chamber music, and waltzes and suites that earned him well-deserved awards, such as the National Music Award for his lifelong musical career (1989).

In 2014 he was honored at the Festival de Juventudes for his lifelong contributions to music, culture and the arts. The celebrations included the screening of a documentary and the distribution of his book “Anecdotes and Other Memories”, his direction of the Inocente Carreño Youth Symphony Orchestra in a formidable concert performed at the Simón Bolívar Hall of the National Center for Social Action for Music in Caracas, and the world premiere of his work El Convidado del Niño Jesús, an opera in one act based on a story by José Rafael Pocaterra. Two years later, on June 29, 2016, Inocente Carreño died at age 96.

Bradley Ottesen

Bradley Ottesen is the violist of the internationally acclaimed Fry Street Quartet. He holds the position of Professor of Professional Practice at Utah State University, and currently serves as the President of the Utah Viola Society.

Hailed as a “triumph of ensemble playing” (New York Times), the Fry Street Quartet has perfected a “blend of technical precision and scorching spontaneity” (Strad Magazine). The FSQ is the endowed Quartet-in-Residence at the College of Arts & Sciences, Utah State University, and for more than twenty years has maintained a busy concertizing schedule alongside their dedicated teaching career.

The FSQ has become known for launching new collaborations that explore the role of the arts in social discourse and education. The Crossroads Project is a meditation on environmental sustainability which blends art with science, developed in partnership with physicist and educator Dr. Robert Davies. To date, Crossroads residencies have been staged more than 50 times in 3 countries, and have involved visual artists, filmmakers, actors, and composers. In recent seasons, the quartet has been involved with the commission, premiere, and recording of new works by composers Gabriela Lena Frank, Laura Kaminsky, Michael Ellison, Clarice Assad, and Libby Larsen.

Professor Ottesen holds degrees from Northwestern University and the New England Conservatory, and his principal teachers have included William Preucil, James Dunham, and Peter Slowik, with further mentorship from cellist Bernard Greenhouse, violinist Eric Rosenblith, and members of the Juilliard, Muir, and Cleveland string quartets.

Prior to joining the Fry Street Quartet, Bradley served as the Assistant Principal Violist with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra in Alberta, Canada. His early orchestral career included extensive training with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, New World Symphony, and the Tanglewood Music Center, performing under the batons of Pierre Boulez, Seiji Ozawa, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Daniel Barenboim.

As an educator, Professor Ottesen has given masterclasses at Oberlin Conservatory, Brigham Young University, University of Iowa, and Penn State University, and in 2015 he presented the pre-college masterclass at the American String Teachers Association’s national convention in Salt Lake City. He is co-director of the Fry Street Chamber Music Festival, and has been guest faculty at the Madeleine Island Chamber Music Festival, Credo Chamber Music Festival, and the Officina de Musica in Curitiba, Brazil.

Sergio Bernal

An outstanding Latin American conductor, composer, and teacher, Sergio Bernal is the Director of Orchestral Studies and a Professor of Music at Utah State University. His conducting activity has earned him international recognition as a "tasteful technician with a more than technical gift for connecting with a score’s essence." His guest engagements include appearances with the Simón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela, the Orquesta Sinfónica Municipal de Caracas, the National Symphony Orchestra and the National Opera of México, the Orquesta Filarmónica de Montevideo, the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia, the Bogotá Philharmonic, the Torun Chamber Orchestra and Szczecin Opera of Poland, the W.A. Mozart Philharmonic of Rumania, the Eugene and New Mexico Symphonies, and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. He conducted the 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018 international Via dei Concerti Festival Orchestra and Choir in concert tours throughout Italy, France, and Spain.

A strong believer in the power of music as a catalyst for social change, Mr. Bernal worked for a decade at El Sistema in Venezuela, the country’s groundbreaking system of youth orchestras. There he served as music director of the Mérida Symphony Orchestra, was a permanent guest conductor and artistic advisor of orchestras nationwide, conducted in a South American tour of the Orquesta de Juventudes de los Países Andinos, and developed an orchestral conducting instructional video to be used by El Sistema in Venezuela and other Latin American countries.

Since his arrival to Utah State University in 2001, Sergio Bernal has taken the Utah State University Symphony Orchestra to important levels of achievement. His innovative programming has attracted national attention in projects such as the 2010 fully staged production with the Utah State Theatre of the Shakespeare/Mendelssohn A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a production subsequently emulated by other theatre companies and symphony orchestras using Mr. Bernal’s performance edition.

As a composer, Mr. Bernal explores the popular and folk idioms from Ibero America and likes to do so in works for soloist and orchestra. His two concerti are written for prominent Venezuelan soloists and have received performances in the US, Argentina, and Venezuela. They are Arcano, dedicated to classical and folk violinist Eddy Marcano, and Andares, a trumpet concerto dedicated to the 2006 Maurice André Competition winner Francisco “Pacho” Flores.

A native Colombian, Bernal studied on a full scholarship and stipend with Lorin Maazel, Günther Herbig, Erich Leinsdorf, and Eleazar De Carvalho in the Yale University / Affiliate Artists Conducting Program. He holds conducting degrees from Yale University and the University of Michigan, a PhD in Composition from the University of Utah, and a B.A. in Music from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College of CUNY. He received additional conducting training at the Aspen Music Festival and the Tanglewood Music Center. In 1986, he apprenticed with the late Maestro Eduardo Mata at the Dallas Symphony and subsequently worked as Mr. Mata’s assistant in recording projects of the Ibero American symphonic repertoire.