Recovecos, curated by Angélica Negrón, is a Green Umbrella program highlighting the music of Caribbean and Latin American composers exploring the many physical and intangible spaces of memory, nostalgia, labor, play, catharsis, longing, joy, and healing. Recovecos translates to “nooks” or “hidden corners.” This concert will examine the obscured spaces, twists, and turns that arise when creating a sense of belonging in two places simultaneously, especially when displaced from home.
One of The Washington Post’s 2022 “Composers and Performers to Watch,” Raquel Acevedo Klein makes her Walt Disney Concert Hall debut with the LA Phil New Music Group, conducting a brand-new arrangement of Darian Donovan Thomas’ “textural, synth-drenched, and ambient reimagining” of Volver, Volver—the Mexican ranchera song by Fernando Maldonado.
Colombian Canadian singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta lends her “irrepressible confidence” (Pitchfork) and voice to her own world-premiere piece as well as Negrón’s powerful Arquitecta. Based on a poem by Puerto Rican writer Amanda Hernández, Arquitecta is a musical illustration of how women build, nurture, and create spaces of belonging, via glittering splashes of percussion and woodwinds.
Pasemisí, Pasemisá kicks off the concert with a playful and nostalgic blend of styles that defined composer Christian Quiñones’ childhood in Puerto Rico—reggaetón, eighties music, hip-hop, and rock. Also on the program is Tania León’s Cuban dance-inspired Toque, a wind quintet by LA Phil National Composers Intensive alum Juan Andrés Vergara, and I’m Right Here by Natalie Joachim, a Haitian American composer with “a fresh and invigorating cross-cultural voice” (The Nation).
This performance is generously supported in part by the Kohl Virtuoso Violin Fund.