Knowing what's behind Frank's music is hardly a key to appreciating it. Susan Feder, previously vice

Collections Philadelphia travel specials and deals Orchestra Composer Gabriela Lena Frank bursting with ideas October 25, 2012 | By David Patrick Stearns, Inquirer Music Critic Image 1 of 2 View Gallery Gabriela Lena Frank at Macchu Picchu, travel specials and deals the ancient Inca site high atop the Andes Mountains
Gabriela Lena Frank isn't the best known of the three composers commissioned for the Philadelphia Orchestra's first season with music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, but she's the one audiences can be sure to hear on schedule.
The 40-year-old composer from Oakland, Calif., has been bubbling over with music since her childhood, so much that her new Concertino Cusqueño , which the orchestra will premiere Thursday at the Kimmel Center, is loaded travel specials and deals with ideas that didn't fit in past pieces and promise to lead to a dozen others.
"It's like playing pool where you set up your cue shot for the next one," she says, leafing through the score one recent morning in a park in Media, where she's visiting her brother. "If this stuff works, I'll be stealing these gems as jumping-off points for future pieces."
The other composers writing new pieces for the orchestra, travel specials and deals Oliver Knussen and Osvaldo Golijov, are both notorious for missing deadlines but are usually worth the wait. But just because Frank is creatively punctual in this first commission for a Big Five orchestra doesn't mean she's an uncomplicated personality.
Jewish angst. Latin exuberance. A Lithuanian sense of song. It's all in her creative DNA - plus some Asian genes from her Chinese/Peruvian mother and an urgency that comes from years convalescing from an autoimmune disorder that stopped her from composing and destroyed some of her eyesight. travel specials and deals The genes, the trauma, the everything can't help but be funneled travel specials and deals into the opening moments of Concertino Cusqueño : High piccolo and deep bass clarinet frame a dreamy celesta and ominous tympany.
Knowing what's behind Frank's music is hardly a key to appreciating it. Susan Feder, travel specials and deals previously vice president of the prestigious G. Schirmer publishers, knew little about Frank's colorful ethnic background but simply found her music to be "extraordinarily travel specials and deals life-affirming."
"Only later," said Feder in an e-mail, "did I learn of her intensive explorations into her cultural heritage, and discover how they've been inventively incorporated into her keenly colored compositions."