Official release of New Voice Singles "Leyendas, an Andean Walkabout"

Well, after an amazing week in New York in which we had the official release of our latest CD, I finally have a moment in which to let all of you faithful readers know about this exciting release. Leyendas, an Andean Walkabout is a string quartet by Gabriela Lena Frank that was commissioned by the Chiara Quartet in 2001 through generous help by the Musicorda Summer String Festival.  It's an amazing, revolutionary work of art.  Its conception was inspired by Gabriela's roots as a half-North American/half-Peruvian child (her father, a Brooklynite, met her mother in Peru while serving in the Peace Corps).  She received a sizeable grant to travel to South America and used it to tour remote villages and cities in the Andes mountains of South America.  With the help of a stealth recording device (microphones cleverly hidden in her eyeglasses) and the posthumous advice of Béla Bartók, who undertook the first such ethnomusicological journey in the early 20th century, she recorded hours of unique South American folk music, and used these recordings to influence the language of her own composition.  Leyendas was one of the first works to be written in this new style.

We recorded the work in 2004 and as of January 11, have officially released the recording as the second in our ground-breaking Chiara New Voice Singles series of recordings of dynamic works commissioned and championed by the Chiara Quartet.  For an unbiased appraisal of Leyendas and of our performance of the work, Alan Kozinn of the New York Times reviewed our "Mestizaje: Harmony of Differences" program at Merkin Concert Hall on January 11, in which we used Leyendas as a kind of musical tour guide through a landscape of composers whose music explores the happenings at the boundaries between two disparate cultures.  In this review, he describes his reaction to the work and to the program overall (there's also a nice photo taken by the Times).

You can acquire our recording of Leyendas, an Andean Walkabout through CDBaby.com/chiarastring2 or amazon.com, or by attending one of our fine performances, where we sell the recording at a reduced price specially for those who come to hear us.