Felipe Lara, a Brazilian-American modernist, is praised by the New York Times for his 'sensational, exuberant, vivid, brilliantly realized, technically formidable, wildly varied, and possessing voluptuous, elemental lyricism' compositions.
Compositional Technique
Felipe Lara's piece Postcard, written for the New York Miniaturist Ensemble, subverts the ensemble's 'one hundred notes' stipulation by using notational ambiguities like multiphonics, glissandi, and repeated passages to expand its musical content.
Performer Biography
The Parker Quartet, a Grammy Award-winning ensemble, is internationally recognized for their 'fearless, yet probingly beautiful' performances and serves as Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University's Department of Music.
Recording & Production
The album features a version of Tran(slate) with live electronics, which was the work's original form and adds a 'third, alien voice' to the quartet's dialogue.
Performer Biography
The JACK Quartet, a Grammy-nominated new-music foursome, is celebrating its 20th anniversary season in 2024-2025 and is the 2024 recipient of Chamber Music America's Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Composer Felipe Lara views the string ensemble not as a 'conversation' of individual voices, but as a single, anatomically unified 'voice' or 'mouth'.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Felipe Lara's chamber music often explores resonances, overtones, and harmonies generated from the 'interior life of a low pitch,' which he describes as 'vowels' or 'spectra generated by the shape of a hypothetical resonating cavity'.
