Synopsis

In the early 1990s, flutist Susan Morris de Jong and guitarist Jeffrey Van commissioned Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra to write three sets of chamber works that have become classics for their combination of instruments. Sierra titled these Crónicas del Descubrimiento, or Chronicles of Discovery, and said they were his vision of the bewilderment the native Indians of Puerto Rico must have felt during first interactions with the Spanish conquistadores, and vice-versa.

Each of the three sets contains two contrasting pieces in which flute and guitar seem to observe, excite and provoke each other, with the first slow atmospheric piece followed by a more rhythmic second one. On today’s date in 1994 in Minneapolis, De Jong and Van presented the third and final set of Sierra’s Chronicles of Discovery, containing two pieces: the first titled Song, and the second, more ominously, Battle.

Sierra left his native Puerto Rico to study composition with György Ligeti in Hamburg in the late 1970s, served as the composer-in-residence of the Milwaukee Symphony in the 1980s and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.

Music Played in Today's Program

Roberto Sierra (b. 1953) – Battalia, from Tercera Crónica del Descubrimiento (Marcelo Barbozab, flute; Fabio Zanona, guitar) Somm CD-0669