Gabriela Lena Frank is the recipient of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Music. The prize was announced yesterday, but certain slow-to-react social media outlets are still catching up with the news.
Frank was recognized for “Picaflor: A Future Myth.” The work is tied to the composer’s personal experiences with the California wildfires and her knowledge Andean legend.
The composition was introduced in Marian Anderson Hall at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts on March 13, 2025, by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. It was a co-commission of the orchestra, the Oregon Symphony, and Bravo! Vail Music Center.
Cast in “ten powerful movements,” as characterized by the Pulitzer committee, “Picaflor” follows an original program, inspired by Andean-Peruvian mythology transplanted to a futuristic setting. “It draws upon the legends of a sky kingdom ruled by a sun god creator, a rebellious hummingbird… who tears through the sky, and the chaski – messengers of the Inca Empire. The piece is also immersed in the concept of pachacuti, the belief that era-worlds undergo cataclysmic transformations every few hundred years. These elements reflect the composer’s own climate activism in both art and life, and her pride as a generational daughter of Indigenous Perú.”
The work is dedicated to the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and is the culmination of a residency with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Frank, whose works have been frequently programmed, was born in Berkeley, CA, to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent. Following in the footsteps of musical heroes Béla Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, she serves as a kind of musical anthropologist. According to her bio, she’s “traveled extensively through South America, and her pieces often reflect and refract her studies of Latin American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a Western classical framework that is uniquely her own.”
I haven’t heard this particular piece yet, but her music is colorful and full of incident.
It’s nice to have a Pulitzer winner that can be performed by an actual symphony orchestra again.
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Frank previews “Picaflor” in 90 seconds:
“Escaramuza” (2010)
“Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout” (2001)
“Elegía Andina” (2000)
“Three Latin American Dances” (2004)
Through a strange quirk of fate, because of my illness this weekend, I was unable to attend “Eugene Onegin” at the Met. So I traded my ticket for a seat at the Met debut of Frank’s recent opera, “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” a magical-realist, upside-down Orpheus and Euridice story about painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
https://www.metopera.org/season/2025-26-season/el-ultimo-sueno-de-frida-y-diego
There’s my Cinco de Mayo connection!
You don’t have to go to New York to see it. It will be simulcast in select cinemas as part of the “Met Live in HD” series on May 30. Find a theater near you at the link (below the photo, there’s a red tab on the right).
https://www.metopera.org/season/in-cinemas/2025-26-season/el-ultimo-sueno-de-frida-y-diego/
A 16-second teaser
Congratulations, Gabriela Lena Frank!