Felipe Lara’s music is driven by a visceral sense of presence and process. Beneath its notated clarity lies a deep trust in the performers: a shared language built over years of collaboration, where every sound becomes a negotiation between gesture, breath, and form. Lara’s work moves between the intimate and the monumental, but always seeks what lies behind the surface – where structure becomes porous, expression is embodied, and music emerges as a living tension between instability and control. It is music that listens forward, that remembers, and that transforms the very act of sound-making into a ritual of co-creation.

Felipe Lara’s Chamber Works for Strings redefines the ensemble as a resonating body, where strings become vocal cords and bows breathe sound into existence. In Corde Vocale and Tran(slate), the quartet is not a polite conversation but a raw, elemental force – organic, urgent, and monstrous. Sonare unfolds in processional waves, while Archi elastici stretches time to its breaking point, embodying breath itself. With Postcard and Prisma, Lara explores dialogue and divergence. Across these works, the voice – literal and metaphorical – becomes motion, tension, and transformation, revealing music as a vital, restless energy in perpetual evolution.

Premiered on March 23, 2023 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, a reimagining of the traditional concerto, with improvisation, vocalization, and Afro-Brazilian elements that forge compelling, intimate relationships between the orchestra and two soloists.

New York Philharmonic commission – orchestral arrangement of Frederick Rzewski’s Variation 33 from The People United Will Never Be Defeated, to be premiered by the NY Phil and Gustavo Dudamel in March 2026 along with arrangements by various distinguished composers. [Buy Tickets]

Felipe Lara’s music is a whirlwind of energy and motion, characterized by large, expressive brushstrokes that leave palpable traces. His works are in constant flux, pulsating with spectral harmonies and iridescent surfaces. This album includes the three ensemble works Chambered Spirals, Fringes and Ventos Uivantes, as well as Injust Intonations, a reflective solo piano piece. Each composition showcases Lara’s unique ability to combine intricate textures with dynamic, expansive gestures to create a captivating sonic journey through musical portals.

Breathing Blocks premiered by the São Paulo State Symphony, conducted by Vasily Petrenko (2025) [Program]

This concert spotlights five thrilling works by Brazilian-American composer Felipe Lara, offering a vivid journey through more than a decade of his distinctive musical voice. Spanning intimate solo writing to expansive large-ensemble works, the program reveals Lara’s fascination with structures and ideas drawn from musical fractals, mirrors, mosaics, and labyrinths. Influences from electronic music are translated into purely instrumental contexts, creatively expanding the expressive and sonic possibilities of acoustic forces. Together, these works trace Lara’s evolving artistic vision that is at once rigorously constructed and richly immersive. [Buy Tickets]

Received Prêmio Concerto 2025 (Public Vote), from Revista Concerto, orchestral category, for the concert which featured the world premiere of Breathing Blocks. Performance by the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) and conductor by Vasily Petrenko, São Paulo, Brazil.

Breathing Blocks for orchestra is the Winner of APCA (São Paulo Association of Art Critics) award for Best Debut Work of 2025 – Classical Music Category. Performance by São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) and conductor by Vasily Petrenko, São Paulo, Brazil.

Interview with Composer Felipe Lara
May 18, 2024 - A Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition commission, Mosaic Maze (2024), for large chamber ensemble, was premiered by the Grossman Ensemble and conductor Jeffery Meyer at the University of Chicago’s Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
photo credit: Anthony Nguyen

Felipe Lara
The New York Philharmonic gave some remarkable concerts this year... perhaps most notable was the New York premiere, in March, of Felipe Lara’s 2019 Double Concerto, which made Claire Chase (on many flutes) and Esperanza Spalding (vocalizing while playing double bass) into a seething and exuberant, if not always sunny, organism. (Read our review of the Lara concerto.)
photo credit: Chris Lee

Felipe Lara was a recipient of the Nexus Award, from Johns Hopkins University. He will be co-curating the Polyaspora Festival with George Lewis, a five-day event focused on contemporary music by black, Brazilian, and Peabody student composers. The festival will feature workshops, lectures, and concerts by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Johns Hopkins’ brand new 555 Pennsylvania Avenue building in Washington DC, Fall 2024.
photo credit: Will Kirk / Johns Hopkins University

Carnegie Hall debut of Parábolas na Caverna and Meditations and Calligraphy part of Claire Chase’s Density project, 18 May 2023 at 7:30pm.

Felipe Lara’s sensational Double Concerto, with Claire Chase and Esperanza Spalding, was played by the New York Philharmonic under Susanna Mälkki.
NY premiere of Double Concerto, for Esperanza Spalding, Claire Chase, and large symphony orchestra, New York Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, David Geffen Hall, March 2023. Financial Times described Lara’s Double Concerto “one of the freshest 21st-century works one has heard,” and the New York Times “sensational,” “a complex but legible, lovable piece; a funky yet elegant ritual; thrilling and taut, if also fundamentally unhurried and unpressured.”
photo credit: Chris Lee

US premiere of Double Concerto, for esperanza spalding, Claire Chase, and large symphony orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, March 2023.

Claire Chase performed Parábolas na Caverna for solo flute, and Meditation and Calligraphy for solo bass flute, at MaerzMusik, Berliner Festspiele, Germany.

Grammy-award-winning Parker Quartet performed Sonare, for string quartet, at John Knowles Paine Hall, Blodgett Chamber Music Series, Harvard University, September 2022.
photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Miller Theatre Portraits Concert performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni. Rebekah Heller performed Metafagote, for bassoon and fixed media, and ICE performed the NY premiere of Chambered Spirals for large chamber ensemble, Columbia University, New York, March 2022.

Commissioned work Postcard 4, for trombone solo, released as part of Royal Academy of Music Bicentennial celebrations, RAM 200. The project involved 200 commissioned composers, including George Benjamin, Hans Abrahamsen, Peter Maxwell Davis, Julian Anderson, Augusta Read Thomas, Joan Tower, and Michael Finnissy, December 2022.