A little over a year after she released Miss Colombia, Lido Pimienta became the first woman of color to compose a piece for the New York City Ballet: 2021’s sky to hold, which presented folk genres like dembow and vallenato on the City Ballet’s esteemed stage. But she had already been composing another orchestral work, one that took notes from a deep well of historical sources: 16th century Italian castrati singers; Czech composer Luboš Fišer; the Gregorian liturgical chant Lux Aeterna. Pimienta uses these inspirations to create La Belleza: an acoustic, liberatory record of personal homecoming and ancestral communion where rumbling timpani, portentous strings, and rising and falling woodwinds meet in conversation with claves, drums, and celestial dembow.
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