This article originally appeared in Issue 50:1 (Sept/Oct 2026) of Fanfare Magazine.

Ensemble for These Times seeks to champion marginalized or forgotten composers. Here, the players turn their attention to Latin America in a stimulating selection of works spread across two discs.

I enjoyed Claudia Montero’s Buenos Aires, despierta y sueña on pianist Isabel Dobarro’s Grad Piano disc, Kaleidoscope (Fanfare 48:5), and her three-movement Buenos Aires en tres (2016, for piano trio) is just as satisfying, the energy of the outer movements contrasting with the pulsatings of the central “Intenso y pesante” and its later, leaden peace. Margaret Halbig, piano, Lylia Guion, violin, and Megan Chartier, cello work superbly well together as a team. The recording would benefit from a touch more depth, but it does carry detail well.

Chartier is the superb cellist for the solo work Milontan by José Bragato, joined, after an extended soliloquy, by Halbig. Bragato makes his Fanfare debut here, and his music is fetchingly lyrical and tonal with some jazz elements, including a walking bass in piano. That was published in 2001; published two years earlier, his Dos canciones argentinas (with Nanette McGuiness) offers a similar sense of easy flow. McGuiness’s vibrato is a touch intrusive, but the music is certainly worth hearing.

I really wanted Gabriela Ortiz’s piece to work. My previous major experiences with Ortiz’s music have both been negative, but both were larger pieces: the Trumpet Concerto, “Altar de Bornce” (Paco Flores/Philharmonia Orchestra/Payare) and the Violin Concerto, “Altar de cuerda” (LAPO/Dudamel, both concerts heard in London), finding them both over-gestural and lacking in depth. Writing for solo piano and within a short duration of some four minutes, one would hope concision would be her pal, but not so. The music appears diffuse and insubstantial, despite Halbig’s ferocious advocacy.

Tania León’s Elegia a Paul Robeson was written in 1987, a warm, immersive bath of a piece for piano trio. Inspired by her grandmother’s love of Robeson, León’s piece is tender, heartfelt, and lovely. A slightly warmer recording would have sealed the deal, though. Her piano piece Tumbao, superbly played by Halbig, is energetic, spiky, like an etude with ambition for greater things.

I have only come across one piece before by Angélica Negrón, her Cooper and Emma on Jennifer Koh’s disc Alone Together (Fanfare 45:3) where, again, her music nestled next to some of León’s. The title here means “Recurring Dreams, I see Fast Cars.” Only the second piece the composer ever wrote, it is gnomic in a Satie-like way, and Halbig treats it as such. Negrón’s melancholy is more South American than Satie’s, though.

I get the impression the next composer is capital letter–averse: not only is the title the motion between three worlds all lower case, but so is the composer’s name, inti figgis-vizueta. From the description of the score, the performer, cellist Megan Chartier, has a fair amount of freedom. Composed in 2020, this is a piece that focuses on liminality: the player is asked to “always be moving between.” It is a fairly diverting soliloquy, and my admiration goes to Chartier’s clear devotion and virtuosity. In total contrast comes the lightheartedness of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Manhattan Serenades for cello and piano. There are three: “Uptown,” “Midtown,” and “Downtown.” It is the perfect close to the first disc, jazz-infused and gritty in the first instance, quieter in the second, an exploration of descent in the piano against which the cello spins a cantabile line (although sudden crescendos and changes of articulation imply there is an underlying anger, perhaps), and lastly a quirky tipping of the hat in the final “Downtown.” Manhattan Serenades is perfectly placed to close the first disc.

Two vocal items kick off the short second disc, both from Carla Lucero’s 2019 chamber opera Juana (inspired by the poet Sor Juana née de la Cruz), heard in arrangements for soprano and piano, and piano trio. These are obviously arrangements, in that the music seeks constantly to expand, either timbrally or dynamically. And yet the hints we get of these pieces are tantalizing indeed, and soprano Chelsea Hollow has the sharp edge that suits this music well. The (vocalist-free) second aria for trio actually works better, as if the challenge of creating an instrumental version created a finer musical experience. The music seeks to burst out again, but now into dance.

I believe the music of Brennan Stokes to be new to me, but hope I will hear more. His The Unseen is a song cycle about loss, illness, and identity, setting the great poet, Sara Teasdale. The music is infused with regret, and Hollow’s voice suddenly occupies vaster spaces. While the texts chart Teasdale’s feelings of isolation, loneliness, and angst, the emotions map perfectly onto the COVID-19 times (the cycle was written in 2021). The titular track “The Unseen,” with its ticking of time in the piano, its disjunctions and spoken lines, is a clear highlight. There is much imagination here, not least in the piano writing of “Gray Fog,” but overall it feels as if it is Teasdale’s words that have the greatest power, the greater memorability. Hollow’s talents are certainly tested, especially in the extreme upper register, and she shows herself a fine interpreter.

A slightly mixed twofer, then, but rewarding overall. Documentation is detailed and useful. Colin Clarke