Album Notes

This CD features some of the most exciting music for violin and piano written in the last ten years by living composers from Latin America now active in the USA. They have all gained attention for the fascinating mix of musical streams that inform their music.

THE PERFORMERS

A champion of contemporary music, violinist Colin Sorgi is the founder and artistic direcor of the Baltimore-based SONAR new music ensemble. He has collaborated wtih members of Alarm Will Sound and Ensemble Intercontemporain. An avid chamber musician, he has been first violinist of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music's Kuttner Quartet, as well as co-founder of the San Antonio-based River City Chamber Players. He has studied at both the Peabody Conservatory and the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music under renowned violinists Herbert Greenbert and Jaime Laredo. Colin is also an award-winning composer.

Pianist Jooeun Pak, a native of South Korea, started playing the piano at age four. She first studied music an pre-med under scholarships at the University of B\Puget Sound and, at the time of this recording, was completing doctoral studies at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music under pianist Edmund Battersby. Jooeun has won prizes in several national and international piano competitions as a soloist, including the Gold Medal in the Korean National Piano Competition and the Grand Prize in the Kyung Hyang Newspaper Competition. She has performed with the Castleton Orchestra under Lorin Maazel and at the Atlanta Music Festival in Maine.

THE COMPOSERS

Pianist and composer Gabriela Lena Frank is of mixed Peruvian, Chinese, Lithuanian, and Jewish descent. She explores Latin American folklore, poetry, mythology, and traditional music, all of which she incorporates into her work.

After her initial training in her native Cuba, Tania León moved to the USA, studying at New York University and working with the Harlem Dance Company as pianist, conductor, and composer. She has become one of the most important Latin American artists working in the USA today.

Juan Orrego-Salas is the leading living composer of Chile and the one who has earned the most widespread prestige abroad. Orrego-Salas joined the faculty at Indiana University, where he founded the Latin American Music Center and became the chair of the Jacobs School of Music's composition department.

Paul Desenne was born in Venezuela of French and American parents. An accomplished cellist, he received the first prize in performance at the Conservatiore National Superieur de Paris, after which he returned to Venezuela to become involved in the world-famous El Sistema's netowrk of youth orchestras.

Miguel del Águila studied in his native Uruguay, as well as at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Vienna's Hochschule fur Musik, and the Vienna Konservatorium. He currently resides in California and has been described by the Los Angeles Times as "one of the West Coast's most promising and enterprising young composers."

More information about the CD and its contents can be found at http://blogs.music.indiana.edu/lamcrecordings.