Gabriela Lena Frank: Present and Future Myth (Symphony)

Summer 2026
by Esteban Meneses

The news came in early May, when Gabriela Lena Frank, the Bay Area composer known for exploring Andean mythology and her own South American heritage through her music, was gearing up for the Metropolitan Opera run of El último Sueño de Frida y Diego. Word was that she’d won the Pulitzer Prize for her orchestral work Picaflor: A future myth, the capstone of her residency at the Philadelphia Orchestra, which gave the world premiere in 2025. The Pulitzer announcement happened just as the opera—about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with a libretto in Spanish by playwright Nilo Cruz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003 for Anna in the Tropics—was about to open in New York in a production directed by Deborah Colker, which ran May 14–June 5.

In terms of prestige and international visibility, it doesn’t get much better than that. The achievement is particularly significant for a multicultural composer with a background—Frank was born in California to a Lithuanian Jewish father and a Peruvian mother of Chinese descent—that is seldom recognized, much less celebrated, in the top echelons of classical music. She is also only the fourth woman composer to be featured at the Metropolitan Opera. Read More