Aguila - Wind Quintet No. 2

Miguel del Aguila

Wind Quintet No. 2 for flute, oboe, Bb clarinet, horn and bassoon

Miguel del Aguila was born 1957 in Montevideo, Uruguay. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and at Vienna’s Hochschule für Musik and Konservatorium. While still living in Vienna, he introduced his piano works in New York’s Carnegie Recital Hall. Days later, Lukas Foss led the U.S. premiere of Hexen with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. CDs containing five of his works were released on KKM-Austria and Albany Records.

Del Aguila returned to the U.S. in 1992, settling in the Los Angeles area. Soon thereafter the Los Angeles Times described him as "one of the West Coast's most promising and enterprising young composers." He received a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award in 1995. He was music director of Ojai Camerata from 1996 to 1999. In the late 1990s his works were performed at Lincoln Center, London’s Royal Opera House, and in Moscow, Vienna, Zurich, Budapest, Prague, Tokyo, and Rome.

From 2001 to 2004 del Aguila was Resident Composer at the Chautauqua Music Festival, where he performed as pianist, contributed new works, and wrote concert reviews. In 2005 he accepted a two-year Composer in Residence position with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, through a Meet The Composer/Music Alive Award. This marked the start of an intensively creative period that culminated with the fully-staged premiere of his third opera Time and Again Barelas, commemorating the tricentennial of the city of Albuquerque.

Del Aguila’s catalog encompasses over one hundred works in all genres and is available on more than 20 CDs, released by Bridge, Dorian, Telarc, New Albion, Albany, and Centaur, among others. In 2010 del Aguila was honored with two Latin Grammy nominations: for the CD Salón Buenos Aires (five chamber ensemble works on Bridge Records) and for the composition Clocks from that recording. Del Aguila has received awards from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Argosy Foundation for Contemporary Music. He was chosen as the Lancaster Symphony Composer of the Year in 2009. In 2008 he received the Meet The Composer Magnum Opus Award, resulting in a commission for the orchestral tone poem The Fall of Cuzco for performance by the Nashville Symphony, The Buffalo Philharmonic, The Virginia Symphony, and the Winnipeg Symphony.

Written in 1994, the Wind Quintet No. 2 is Miguel del Aguila’s Op. 46. It is dedicated to The Bach Camerata who commissioned and premiered it in Santa Barbara, CA on January 26, 1995. In the same year the Wind Quintet No. 2 was awarded a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for excellence in chamber music composition. The four movements of the piece follow programs suggested by their titles: Back in Time, In Heaven, Under the Earth, and Far Away.

“The Wind Quintet No. 2 tells the events of a story which take us to a completely different place in each movement, much in the same way as would four acts of a theater play. I exploited the nearly unlimited coloristic possibilities of the instruments to obtain unconventional sounds. Harmony and melody are also used to help the instruments create these particular colors. Although I made extensive use of new performance techniques and effects, I avoided making them sound “new” or obtrusive by blending them with other instruments playing in conventional styles.”

—Miguel del Aguila

CONTENTS: I. II. III. IV.

Back in Time…………………………pg.1 In Heaven…………………………….pg.6 Under the Earth………………………pg.19 Far Away…………………………..…pg.22