FIU Music Festival: Toomai String Quintet

Music, dance, film and spoken text converge in a multidisciplinary FIU Music Festival program at the Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center. Taking place Sunday, October 18, the concert features Toomai String Quintet in works by Tania León, Leo Brouwer and composers with close ties to FIU. The program includes music by Distinguished University Professor Orlando Jacinto García and FIU alumni Carlos Rafael Rivera and Marcus Norris.

Formed at The Juilliard School, Toomai String Quintet is known for expanding the string ensemble repertoire and championing music across cultural traditions. Its commitment to Latin American music has led to more than 30 arrangements and commissions, along with recordings including Cuerdas Cubanas and Passos Brasileiros. For this concert, the ensemble performs León’s Tumbao, Brouwer’s Música incidental campesina, Norris’s My Idols Are Dead and Rivera’s Queen’s Gambit Suite, drawn from his Grammy and Emmy-winning score for the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit.

The program’s theatrical centerpiece is García’s prohibido (prohibited), presented in an intimate version for Toomai String Quintet with dancers Emily Bromberg and Alexander Sokolov of Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami. Featuring choreography by Ariel Rose and video by Jacek Kolasinski and John Stuart, the work combines music, dance, video and spoken text in English and Spanish while confronting repression tied to identity, belief, race, religion and sexual orientation.

A preconcert conversation at 4:30 p.m. brings Rivera, Norris and García together to discuss their music, FIU connections and careers spanning concert music, opera, film and television.