Welcome to another week of listening to women in music! There is lots to hear this week.

Announced June 15th, the London Philharmonic Orchestra will extend their partnership with their Principal Guest Conductor Karina Canellakis for an additional three years (through the 2029/30 season). Canellakis began her role with the LPO in 2021 and has led the orchestra in award-winning projects throughout the UK and Europe. Their recent tour with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter was nominated for an Opus Klassik Tour of the Year award; in 2025 they released a double CD of Tchaikovsky’s 5th and 6th symphonies on the LPO’s house label.

After winning the 2016 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, Canellakis has been a guest conductor with leading orchestras across the United States, the UK, and Europe. She will continue her work with the LPO simultaneously with her role as Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. Listeners will be able to see and hear Canellakis in action during the 2026/27 season with: her Lucerne Festival debut, Musikfest Berlin (with the RFO and Netherlands Radio Choir), the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and EIF choir at the Edinburgh International Festival, the Chicago Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the Swedish Radio Symphony, the Vienna Symphony, and her Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva debut.

Lately, the La Maestra Competition has announced its 2026 finalists. Now in its fourth edition, the International Competition for Women Conductors “La Maestra” continues to pursue its goal for increasing women’s representation on the conductor’s podium and in musical leadership. It cites as its three goals: ” to champion the professional ambitions of women conductors, to unite the international musical community behind a strong commitment to gender equality on the podium, and to provide emerging conductors with the support they did not always receive during their training.” Finalists are: Molly Turner, Alizé Léhon, Jiajing Lai, and Mojca Lavrenčič.

On June 22 the world will celebrate the centenary of composer Ruth Zechlin (1926–2007). She studied at the Leipzig

Academy of Music from 1943 – 1949, building her expertise in composition, choral conducting, and piano, and organ. Her prowess with keyboard instruments would lead to her reputation as a harpsichordist and cembalist. She moved to the newly-founded Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in East Berlin in 1950; in 1984 she became a full professor. There’s a streak of traditionalism in her work—particularly in homages to J.S. Bach—that hints at the limits imposed by Nazi ideology on her early training.

Three events are planned to commemorate the composer and her work across Germany this week: on June 22, “For Ruth Zechlin on her 100th birthday,” at the Händelhaus Halle; on June 23, “In Memory of Ruth Zechlin and Carl Maria von Weber,” at the Philharmonie Berlin; and from June 26 – 28, the “Symposium and concert: Ruth Zechlin 100 – Aesthetic and Political Constellations,” at the Schloss Belvedere in Weimar.

Below is a recording of Zechlin’s Venezianisches Cembalokonzert, for harpsichord and strings (1993) in three movements, performed by the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie and directed by Toshiyuki Kamioka.

On June 27, Protestra will present its concert “Founding Mothers” in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. The concert will feature two premieres of works for orchestra by women composers, Danielle Jagelski and JL Marlor; it will also feature music by Amy Beach, Nadia Boulanger, Valerie Coleman, and Joan Tower, as well as Florence Price’s Symphony No. 4.

Amid the pieces by historical women composers t’s gratifying to see a piece that is not Price’s Symphony No. 1 appearing on the program. Audiences understandably love Price’s first symphony for its lyric tunes and lush orchestration; its premiere by the Chicago Symphony made her the first African-American woman to have her work premiered by a top American orchestra. It’s a fantastic work that ought to be programmed AND it’s not the only symphony worth listening to in her repertoire. I suspect (and hope!) that the popularity of Price’s first symphony is part of what prompted Protestra to look farther afield in her repertoire for music to include on their celebration concert. A. Kori Hill has produced a fabulous interview with both women, which can be reason I Care If You Listen‘s website.

From June 29 – July 1, the Boulanger Initiative will present a virtual course on music by women in the US: “Balancing the Narrative – Women Creating Music in the United States.” The Boulander Initiative course “goes head to head with the assumption that US-American music was written solely by men, and introduces you to the Women Composers of the United States: not as additions, but as essential voices in shaping the nation’s sound.” The virtual course will include sessions on early history and exploring women’s contributions to the foundations of music in the United States, the 19th and 20th centuries, and the recentpast/near future. Creators featured include: Crosby, Palmer Knapp, Crawford Seeger, Queen Lili’uokalani, and Ruthven Lang. Financial assistance is available for attendance.

Let us know who you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org.

Here are a few things going on mid-June!

Gabriela Ortiz, composer, with GRAMMY Award

On Wednesday June 17, the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic will perform a program that includes Gabriela Ortiz’s Antrópolis, led by Marin Alsop (Carnegie Hall Perspectives Artist). This performance marks the ensemble’s Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage debut.

In her notes about the piece, Ortiz writes that “In Mexico, until the ’90s, the term [antro] referred to bars or entertainment places of dubious reputation. But nowadays, and especially among younger people, this word refers to any bar or nightclub. While she and flutist Alejandro Escuer were imagining the earliest ideas that would come to be Antropolis, they talked about wanting to evoke not only the music but also the energy and dance of Mexico’s bars and dance halls. Antrópolis became the title—“a neologism, a precise invented name for a piece that narrates the sound of the city through its dance halls and nightclubs.”

Below is a recording of Ortiz’s Antrópolis, premiered by the Orquesta de Minería in 2022, conducted by Carlos Miguel Prieto.

Tues. June 16 to Sat. June 20, chamber ensemble Mise-En presents a series of six concerts of contemporary American music in NYC. Twelve of the new and recent pieces presented are works by women composers: Kiki Xiaoman Liu (USA/China): Mirage (2023); Mary Simoni (USA/USA): (Don’t)BeMad (2023); Jee Won Kim (USA/South Korea): Whisperweave (2024); Treya Nash (USA/USA): whisper (2024); Shoko Nagai (USA/Japan): Synthesis Magma (2023); JungAh Lee (South Korea/South Korea): intatto (2024, rev 2025); Maria Vittoria Agresti (Italy/Italy): Burnt (2025); Yanqi Chen (USA/China): They Have Only Exisitence (2025); Kari Watson (USA/USA): VISTAS: WARP, WEFT (2025); Justine Leichtling (USA/USA): Female Loneliness (2025); Liann Kang (USA/South Korea): L’amour pur(2024); and Jonghee Kang (South Korea/South Korea): Insaninhae(Sea of People) (2025).

Deon Nielsen Price (Credit: Wind Repertory Project)

On Tuesday June 16th, the North/South Chamber Orchestra concludes its 46th season in New York City. Their concert will feature a performance of Deon Nielsen Price’s Becoming Screenland for clarinet & strings. Becoming Screenland is a musical tribute to Culver City, California, the composer’s longtime home. Using the Tongva song “Song After the Blessing,” it explores the legacy and change of the area, from Spanish colonization over 200 years ago to the early 20th century. Price is a prizewinning polymath of contemporary classical music—she has done award-winning work as a pianist, composer, recording artist, educator, conductor, author, and served as president of the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM).

Included below is a wonderful older work of Price’s for three soloists and orchestra: the Tripple Flute Concerto for three flutes of varying sizes and chamber orchestra. It is performed here by the Metro Chamber Orchestra in a recording from 2015.

Down under, the Australian Chamber Orchestra performs a British-themed program titled Isle of Light in 10 concerts in 5 different Australian cities from June 13 to 23. The program concludes with Elizabeth Maconchy’s Symphony for Double String Orchestra. Completed in 1953, this intense Symphony has been described as one of her masterpieces. Maconchy studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams, who is also on the concert.

Gabriela Lena Frank speaking at University of the Pacific

Gabriela Lena Frank continues to enjoy much deserved acclaim following her 2026 Pulitzer Prize win and being named Musical America’s Composer of the Year for this year.

On June 12 and 13, the Grant Park Music Festival in Chicago presents Frank’s monumental Conquest Requiem, with Latin and Spanish text by Nilo Cruz. Commissioned by the Houston Symphony in 2017, the Conquest Requiem reckons with the colonial history of the Americas. In her note to the piece, Frank writes that: “Much has been written of the violent meeting of the Old and New Worlds that produced the Americas known to the world today. … Against such grand historical strokes, the stories of ordinary people are easily swept away but for the efforts of creative imagination, employed here in the Conquest Requiem. This piece is inspired by the true story of Malinche, a Nahua woman from the Gulf Coast of Mexico who was given to the Spaniards as a young slave.” The piece combines both mythologized and historical details of Malinche’s life in addition to Nahua poetry and excerpts from the Mass for the Dead in Latin.

On June 25, the Britt Festival Orchestra will perform the premiere of the Frida y Diego Suite drawn from Frank’s opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego. The adaptation and performance of the Suite follows the fantastic success of the full opera at both the Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago during their 2025–2026 seasons. Both the opera and the Conquest Requiem (above) are collaborations between Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz.

Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org

We hope your June is going well! Here’s some news to get your week going!!

Beginning June 10, the Welsh National Opera orchestra will perform Sarah Frances Jenkins’s The Coming of Night as part of its Summer Soiree program. The Soiree runs from June 10 –20 at various venues in Wales and Bristol.

The Coming of Night began its life as a sextet for flute, clarinet, horn, violin, viola and cello; in 2024 Jenkins adapted and reworked the piece for orchestra, and the new version was premiered by the Manukau Symphony in New Zealand (link below). Her original commission came from BBC Radio 3 (the classical music arm of the UK national broadcasting company) and the BBC Concert Orchestra to write “a 4-minute sextet for Radio 3’s ‘Capturing Twilight’ broadcast series.” Given twilight as her requested inspiration for the piece Jenkins did some research and came across “The Coming of Night” by American poet Emily Dickinson. She found that it offered an excellent foil for exploring the atmospheres and images of this transitional time of day, and helped strengthen the narrative thrust of the piece.

Jenkins (b. 1998) has been a regular collaborator with the BBC orchestras. In 2017 she won the Young Composer of the Year award (earning her a professional performance of a piece by the Aurora Orchestra and a broadcast on Radio 3), and in 2018 the BBC Concert Orchestra commissioned another piece And the Sun Stood Still.

Below is the premiere recording of The Coming of Night, performed by the Manukau Symphony Orchestra in 2024.

On June 12, soprano Paulina Francisco will lead a program featuring thirteen works by ten women composers entitled, “The Ornamented Voice: Women Composers of the Baroque.” The concert will take place at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley (CA) as a part of the 19th biennial Berkeley Festival and Exhibition (BFX), organized by the San Francisco Early Music Society. Musica Pacifica—a Bay Area favorite baroque music ensemble—will accompany Francisco in “a program of expressive, virtuosic, and emotionally rich works.” Composers on the program include a veritable who’s-who of women composing seventeenth and early eighteenth century music: Isabella Leonarda, Francesca Caccini, Maddalena Casulana, Barbara Strozzi, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, Mrs. Philharmonica, Elizabeth Turner, Anna Amalia von Preussen, Gracia Baptista, and Bianca Maria Meda.

On June 6, the NEXT Festival of Emerging Artists will present a concert celebrating the work of women immigrant composers for string orchestra. It will feature the world premiere of The Book of Signatures by Andrea Casarrubios for cello, strings, and percussion—the centerpiece of this dynamic program. The planned works show the kind of wealth of talent that contemporary classical music has, but is often not given credit for. World premieres of Adeliia Faizullina’s Six, Before She Knew and After (Tatar from Uzbekistan) and Casarrubios’s concerto; premieres of all-string arrangements of Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s For Love Seemed Easy at First (Iran) and excerpts from Wang Lu’s Tangrams (China); a U.S. premiere of Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Ur Song (Serbia); and selected movements form Clarice Assad’s Impressions.Planned as part of the celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, NEXT’s program is a true celebration of the quality and diversity of classical music in the U.S.

A composer with an upcoming birthday, Lucia Dlugoszewski (June 16th, 1925 – April 11, 2000) was a Polish-American composer of experimental music. Her talents extended beyond composing and performing to writing poetry, choreography, and inventing instruments (an area, where in textbooks, Harry Partch seems to take a lot of the credit). She wrote for ensembles spanning small chamber groups to large orchestras, both with and without choreography. Dlugoszewski was the first woman to win the Koussevitzky International Recording Award in 1977 for her Fire Fragile Flight, written for 17 instruments. For many years the work was a favorite of the Philadelphia ensemble Orchestra of Our Time; you can hear their recording of the work here.

Recently a renewed interest has been showing in Dlugoszewski’s music. In 2024 Maerz Music (the festival that succeeded the Musik-Biennale Berlin) published “Contemplations into the Radical Others: The Life of Lucia Dlugoszewski,” covering both the composer’s life and her approaches to contemporary music. Though she studied analysis with Cage and Varèse‚—a contemporary music background envied by many—her voice was entirely her own. “Dlugoszewski was driven towards philosophical questions on the notion of immediacy, which she has explored with experimental and situated listening,” they have described. “She proposed a sense of ‘shattering’ normative modes of hearing in order to explore specific modes through which sounds are experienced.” Bowerbird (a Philadelphia nonprofit) has also presented a number of her works in recent years, and platformed the research of scholar Dustin Hurt into her work using her papers archives at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Our friends at the Boulanger Initiative are launching their summer series of intensive online classes — the first one “Where are the women?” starts TODAY June 8, 5:30 to 7:30 PM Eastern time — with sessions the next 4 days. If you are a WPA supporter, you are eligible for a discount! Join BI’s Research Manager Dr. Caiti Beth McKinney in this four-day in-depth learning experience. This course is designed for anyone with a passion for learning more about women composers throughout history. It can be attended synchronously or asynchronously, and recordings will be available to all registrants for a month. Boulanger Initiative offers two other classes this summer, June 29-July 1 and Aug. 3-6, more information here.

Finally, we introduce the Belgian composer Juliette Folville (1870-1946), with a biographical blog post, by our distinguished guest blogger, Dr. Fauve Bougard. We will soon be publishing a work for cello and orchestra by Folville, and additional works in the future!

Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org

We have a range of interesting stories for you to start your week!

On May 24th, Marin Alsop was announced as the Festival Director of the 2027 May Festival in Cincinnati, OH. The Festival takes place next year from May 17-30, 2027. Among its large works will feature the U.S. premiere of a new work by composer Anna Clyne, Roxanna Panufnik’s Across the Line of Dreams (2020), as well as Julia Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth for choir and orchestra (2019). Wolfe was Festival Director in 2024, and wrote Fire in My Mouth in 2019 to commemorate the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and its aftermath as a core historical event in the history of immigration in the United States; Panufnik’s Across the Line of Dreams commemorates the ratification of the 19th Amendment conferring US women the right to vote.

Other works will include Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade with its powerful titular storytelling character, and a version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with text by former Poet Laureate of the U.S. Tracy K. Smith. Alsop is a regular at the May Festival, having conducted for it several times before. As in many of her other directorial endeavors, she brings her combined enthusiasm, advocacy, and creativity to the podium in her repertoire choices and her approach to directing the ensembles before her. Together with the festival’s Director of Choruses Matthew Swanson she will lead a series of concerts that celebrate the power and presence of women through music.

Below is the movement “Protest” (Section III) from Wolfe’s Fire In My Mouth, performed by the New York Philharmonic and members for the Young People’s Chorus of New York City in March 2021.

On May 28, 2026, Antonia Bembo’s opera Ercole Amante (1707) was scheduled for its modern premiere at the Opèra Bastille in Paris. (The premiere was further delayed due to a strike, but the opera is now in performance through June 14.) Claire Fontijn (Professor of Music, Wellesley College) has offered an account in The Conversation of the opera’s history, the composer’s circumstances in writing it, and its presence onstage in 2026.

Fontijn has been studying the music of Antonia Bembo since 1990—when the composer’s name was a barely-registered indication on the title pages of obscure scores, and scholars did not have enough scattered facts about her life to place her accurately in history. In her account for The Conversation, Fontijn describe a situation that sounds all too familiar: “Once I confirmed that she was not born into, but had married into, the patrician Bembo family, I was able to not only identify her, but also tell her story in my 2006 biography, “Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo.” Tracing historical woman composers often involves a perverse kind of reverse-scavenger hunt through the records of the male members of their families. Bembo has another reason to be difficult find however: she spent much of her life on the run hiding from an abusive husband. She fled to Paris in 1677, and her Venetian training earned her a place in a women’s residential community after singing for Louis XIV. Only after her husband’s death in 1703 did she feel free to assemble and publicize her manuscripts of cantatas, celebratory motets, and music dramas.

While this Parisian event is the first modern staged performance, the work was recorded last year by Il Justo Barocco and we also must give credit to the Boston-based ensemble La Donna Musicale whose recordings and performances of a range of Bembo’s work during the 2000s, including the complete Seven Psalms of David, did much to generate interest in the composer.

One June 7, Chineke! Orchestra performs Florence Price’s Symphony n. 1 on a program celebrating the music of Black composers at the Southbank Centre in London. Njioma Chinyere Grevious (violin) will be the featured soloist for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G minor, Op.80; the orchestra performs Carlos Simon’s 4 Black American Dances for orchestra and Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1. Price’s symphony has been enjoying a lot of attention recent years; its claim to fame is as the first symphony by a Black woman performed by a major U.S. orchestra—Chicago in 1933. Its historic status has earned it a place as a crown jewel of the Florence Price revival, but this isn’t what keeps audiences coming back to it. Price’s work is both lyrically and rhythmically vital—it has good tunes and danceable rhythms—combined with her emotive orchestral writing that makes great use of all the different timbres the early 20th-century ensemble had to offer. (I’m personally grateful that she doesn’t leave the low brass sitting in the back like a handful of spare parts, but finds work for them throughout! :-D)

On June 10, Marin Alsop conducts the London Philharmonia Orchestra at the Palau de la Música, Barcelona. The concert’s headline work is the world premiere of Olivia Pérez-Collellmir’s Els set somnis de Gaudí (Seven Dreams of Gaudí) for orchestra and choir, with words by Catalan poet Anna Gual. The concert observes the 100th anniversary of death of Antoni Gaudí. Pérez-Collellmir writes music that blends the influences of her European roots with techniques and ideas from her American education. She studied at the Conservatori Superior de Música de Barcelona and later the University of Barcelona; she studied music and philosophy and education there before receiving a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She is the first Catalan, and the first Spanish pianist ever appointed to the faculty of Berklee College of Music.

Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org

On May 15th, St. Paul’s Sinfonia (dir. John Andrews) performs “British Landscapes” at the historic St. Alfege Church, Greenwich, London. The program features Penillion (a symphonic poem) by Grace Williams and the Piano Concerto by Avril Coleridge-Taylor with Dr. Samantha Ege as the soloist.

Dr. Ege is rightly known for her excellence as a pianist as well as her scholarship and advocacy for the work of women composers of color. She is author of the award-winning book, South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene and she co-edited the newly released Cambridge Companion to Florence Price, with Dr. A. Kori Hill. Not content to limit herself to writing about the lives and musical works of women composers of color, her discography centers their music as well. Her six most recent albums feature works by Florence Price, Avril Coleridge-Taylor, Julia Perry, Margaret Bonds, Helen Hagan, and others. Her performances of Coleridge-Taylor’s Concerto has been leading the charge in a revival of the composer’s music. Avril’s legacy had long been eclipsed by her famous father, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Included below is the album, Avril Coleridge-Taylor: Piano Concerto and Orchestral Works (Resonus, 2025)— the first professionally recorded album entirely of the composer’s orchestral music. The BBC Philharmonic recorded it in 2025, with Dr. Ege as soloist, and it featured in WPA’s 2025 in Albums series.

On May 17, the Warsaw Philharmonic is playing an orchestration of Grażyna Baciewicz’ Scherzo alongside a program of other music as the finale to Birmingham Classical, as part of a short UK tour. The Scherzo was originally for piano, but WP conductor Krzysztof Urbański has orchestrated it for the ensemble. Though it is wonderful to see her on the program, it’s hard not to speculate about why conductor Urbański chose to program an orchestration of her work instead of selecting one of her own brilliant pieces for orchestra, such as the Concerto for Symphony Orchestra (1962), the Variations for Orchestra (1957), or any of her four symphonies (1945, 1951, 1952, 1953). Her fourth symphony famously won the Polish Ministry of Culture Prize in 1955. There are always logistics to consider in programming, though it’s more than a recognized pattern that compositions by women are often left to fill the “left-over” spots after the large anchor works have been chosen—in the WP’s case, by Chopin and Beethoven. Perhaps the next time they tour the orchestra will have the pride and the wisdom to put music by this award-winning Polish composer in the headline spot.

The Pulitzer Committee announced on Monday May 4 that Picaflor: A Future Myth by Gabriela Lena Frank has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The prize is given for a “distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year.” Lena Frank’s work was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra on. March 13th under the direction of Marin Alsop. Picaflor was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Oregon Symphony, and the Bravo! Vail Music Festival. Alsop and the Philadelphia Orchestra will offer audiences a repeat performance on July 6th.

As if winning a Pulitzer Prize were not enough distinction, Lena Frank’s opera El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego will begin its run at the Metropolitan Opera on May 14th. This opera is Lena Frank’s Metropolitan Opera debut, and the fourth opera composed by a woman to be performed there. Lena Frank’s El Último Sueño joins the ranks of Dame Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald (1903), Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin (2016), and Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded (2024). The opera runs from May 14 to June 5th, and will also be available to view in cinemas in HD on May 30th.

Below is a short interview clip with composer Gabriela Lena Frank about composing Picaflor and its world premiere.

On May 16, 2025, Tapestry Opera with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will hold a masterclass for women & non-binary conductors in Roy Thomson Hall. Participants include Monica Chen, Eve Legault, and Serena Reuten, all fellows of the Women in Musical Leadership (WML) Conducting Program.

On May 17, 2026, the Community Women’s Orchestra of Oakland, CA offers the final concert of its 2025 – 2026 season. The program includes Ruth Gipps’s Death on a Pale Horse and Grażyna Bacewicz’s Violin Concerto No. 1. Both composers’ orchestral offerings have been enjoying renewed interesting recent years, as readers of Feminist in the Concert Hall will recognize. Ruth Gipps’s work in particular has been the subject of a recent album series by the BBC Philharmonic on Chandos Records, the third and fourth albums of which were released in 2025. They also featured prominently in WPA’s 2025 in Albums series.

Below is Gipps’s tone poem Death on a Pale Horse, which was released on the second album of the Chandos series.

On May 16th, 2026, four living women composers from the Los Angeles area have their music performed alongside works by four historic women composers who also called LA home at various points in their lives and careers. The concert, by the “HERS: Music Ensemble” is free and open to the public at the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena. It will pair music by contemporary composers Reena Esmail, Dale Trumbore, Brooke DeRosa and Zanaida Robles with pieces by Alma Mahler, Carrie Jacobs-Bond, Mary Carr Moore and Margaret Bonds.

Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org

Exciting things going on! And even if you can’t get to the concerts we give some links to music so you can have a listen!

On May 5th, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and Bamberg University Choir will perform a concert of video game music from classic and contemporary games. Eímear Noone, composer of the music for the legendary computer role-playing game “World of Warcraft” will conduct the orchestra. Noone is an Irish conductor and composer who has made a name for herself in videogame music and technology, and who is also famous for being the first woman to conduct the Academy Awards in 2020. Recently, she composed the score for the Channel 5’s (British free-to-air public broadcast television) drama series Maxine and Stephen Fry’s new production based on Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Canterville Ghost.” Noone also composed the score for the animated feature film, Two by Two: Overboard, which topped the UK Box Office in October 2020 and earned her an Ivor Novello nomination for Best Original Film Score.

On May 7th and 8th the Gulbenkian Orchestra will perform Louise Farrenc’s Overture No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 24 on a concert sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation featuring other works by Beethoven and Robert Schumann. Farrenc composed the overture in 1834. Her larger symphonic works (i.e., overtures, symphonies) take much of their inspiration from Haydn and Mozart. Critics have often described them as conventional and overlooked them for playing by the rules instead of making attempts to be inventive with their respective forms, but in the 1830s a woman who wanted to write music in large-scale so-called “masculine” genres—specifically things that required public performance or large instrumental forces—could do little else. Much of her work was re-discovered in the late 20th century when musicologists took an interest in women composers.

On May 7 Symphoniker Hamburg will perform Charlotte Sohy’s Thème varié for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 15 alongside works by Schumann, Fauré, and Strauss. Sohy was highly esteemed as a French composer contemporary to Nadia and Lili Boulanger; she hosted a lively salon with her husband, composer Marcel Labey, and she has been another beneficiary of the late 20th century’s renewed interest in women composers.

Below is the exciting recent American premiere of Sohy’s Symphony in C# Minor, Op. 10, performed by the Texas Medical Center Orchestra under the direction of Libi Lebel.

On May 9, the Austin Civic Orchestra presents its program The Extraordinary Woman, including music by Libby Larsen and Grete von Zieritz. Larsen’s Overture to the End of a Century for Orchestra was composed in 1994, commissioned by the National Music Educators Convention and the National Association of Orchestras. She writes in her own notes for the piece that “the work explores some approaches to sound which have become part of our musical world in the last part of this century: the mixing board which can make a foreground elements which were once heard as background only; the computer screen, which can make fragments as interesting as complete lines; and the synthesizer, with its new sounds, and emphasis on color and pulse.” Grete von Zieritz’s Bilder vom Jahrmarkt (Scenes from a Fair) for flute and orchestra was composed in 1937. It features Ebonee Thomas as soloist. A number of the composer’s works for orchestra prominently feature flute, including two concerti grossi written shortly after Scenes from a Fair.

From April 30 – May 3 the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra performed a new commissioned work by Métis composer Karen Sunabacka at Hearing Her Voice. Her work, titled nitatisipwētānān: We are Leaving, is a setting of text by her mother Joyce Clouston. Sunabacka draws on traditions of intergenerational storytelling and collaboration for her inspiration. Cristina Zacharias, violinist and co-director, described the program: “What’s so powerful about this program (Hearing Her Voice) is the dialogue it creates across time, bringing forward extraordinary music by women of the past alongside a new work that speaks from the present . . . It reveals a lineage of creativity that has always existed, even if it hasn’t always been heard.” Tafelmusik focuses on women composers from the past. Aside from Sunabacka’s piece on this program, all other works were written by female composers from previous centuries, including: Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Barbara Strozzi, Mademoiselle Duval, Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, Maria Teresa Agnesi, Maria Margherita Grimani, and Mrs Philarmonica, an early-18th century English Baroque composer.

Portsmouth University will be celebrating the legacy of Freda Swain, a Portsmouth composer, as part of the city’s centenary celebration. On May 7th a lecture recital featuring her music will be the first of twelve events featuring her music, and will include works for piano, voice, and selections by the University of Portsmouth Choir. On May 10 there is a large choral concert involving many organizations. Swain wrote over 600 works in her lifetime, spanning piano works and chamber music, songs, operas, and orchestral pieces. A woman after our own hearts at WPA, she was also a campaigner for women composers and performers, and for better representation of new British music. The twelve events celebrating her work are all supported by the research of Laura Casas Cambra, whose research includes the exhibition Women Composers at the Royal College of Music and her ongoing doctoral project 260 Women: Investigating the Interwar Generation of Women Composers at the Royal College of Music. What a great project!!

From May 6 – 8, the New York Philharmonic and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra presents their first-ever joint concert. Dudamel will lead the NY Phil in a series of works from across the Americas, including Gabriela Ortiz’s Antrópolis. After intermission, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra will join them onstage—a three-time Grammy-winning Salsa and Latin Jazz band led by Oscar Hernández. The composer discusses her inspiration for the piece here, remembering the 1980s and how she brought Mexican dance club influences into the orchestral space. The opening timpani solo hints at how much Ortiz loves to write for percussion—and under-used medium, she believes, in orchestral music.

Below is Ortiz’s featured work from the program, Antrópolis, performed by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería.

Let us know what you’re listening to, and about events coming up!!

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Wow! Exciting news to start the week!

Scotland’s International Helen Hopekirk Competition & Festival has announced its 2026 dates. The festival will take place from May18–24 at venues in Glasgow & Edinburgh; the live Piano and Organ Competition in Edinburgh on May 22–23; and the Online Competition in Piano, Organ, and Composition on September 10. This year’s festivities honor the composer’s 170th anniversary as well as her artistic legacy. Hopekirk was a Scottish-American pianist, composer, and pedagogue active at the turn of the twentieth century. She studied at the Leipzig Conservatory (1876–78) and in Vienna, and later made her debut with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1878. She later moved to Boston where she performed with the Boston Symphony and taught at the New England Conservatory. AND we publish Hopekirk’s dramtic Concertstück for Piano and Orchestra in D Minor, whcih Hopekirk premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1904. You can hear the 2015 revival by Gary Steigerwalt and the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra:

The International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) is calling for scores from its current members in its annual Search for New Music (SNM). The call is open until May 4, 2026. The IAWM holds the annual composition competition for new and veteran Alliance members who identify as women and non-binary composers, and it includes several prize categories ranging from chamber and orchestral works to electroacoustic media, improvisation, and sound installation.

The Next Festival of Emerging Artists (”NextFest”) has been announced for May 29–June 12, 2026. The 2026 festival marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and will spotlight women immigrant composers who have shaped the American sound. The centerpiece of the festival will be GRAMMY®-nominated cellist/composer Andrea Casarrubios and her new double concerto for cello, percussion, and strings. Casarrubios also recently expanded her 2024 concerto MIRAGE for Cello and Orchestra for the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, which they performed together on April 25th, 2025. Her concerto work as both composer and performer draws a lot of inspiration from the cultural duality of being a Spanish-American woman and the cosmopolitan, multi-city nature of her career.

Below is a recording of Casarrubios’s original version of MIRAGE for cello and chamber orchestra, performed by cellist Amit Peled with the Mount Vernon Virtuosi.

The Curtis Institute of Music has announced that Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe will be the 2026-27 composer-in-residence with the Curtis New Music Ensemble (CNME). Among her many other accolades, Wolfe is currently the artistic director of the CNME. The second concert of the CNME’s year (date TBA) will be Portrait of Julia Wolfe, and will celebrate her work and career as a composer. Wolfe is a prominent, influential voice in US contemporary music and among women composers, and a WPA favorite. She is a winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music, a 2016 MacArthur fellowship, and Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year award. Her music blends the timbres and techniques of classical music with influences from folk music, rock/popular music, and aspects of minimalism . She’s known for music that defies genre expectations. Her oratorio Anthracite Fields, for which she won the 2015 Pulitzer, uses a chorus and sextet to evoke the experiences and emotions of coal-mining life in Pennsylvania near the turn of the 20th Century.

On May 1, the Minnesota Orchestra will perform Florence Price’s The Heart of a Woman with orchestration by Lior Rosner as part of its program More to Hear: The Listening Project. Begun on 2021, the goal of the project is to present and record high-quality performances of music by obscure or underrepresented composers; as the project has progressed, the orchestra has trained the project on under-recorded works as well. Florence Price, whose music has been undergoing a rediscovery and revival in recent years, has a number of works for orchestra—such as her first symphony—that are concert-ready, and those have been in heavy rotation given the popularity of her music with audiences. I admit to some curiosity about why the Minnesota Orchestra is working with an orchestration of Price’s work by another composer, especially given the recent controversy involving a forgery of her Rainbow Waltz performed by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and Viennese composer/conductor Wolfgang Dörner earlier this year. Dr. Michael Cooper, a scholar and longtime champion of Price’s work, has detailed the controversy and highlighted the problems it exposes several times for publication, collected in this digest post. I expect that a twofold reason for the collaborative orchestration is the MO’s desire to present a less-performed piece by Price, and that such a piece should have a prominent singer. (Fine motivations, all.) The program notes, which are available on the Minnesota Orchestra’s website, describe the orchestration as “curated and orchestrated by Lior Rosner.” It draws from Price’s repertoire of nearly 100 songs for voice and piano, and the songs are selected from a larger collection of 44 art songs and spirituals. I hope that in future recordings the MO will make its reasons and methods surrounding the new orchestration explicit in light of the forgery that has been performed in Price’s name.

On May 2, the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra will perform composer-in-residence Elena Ruehr‘s Broadway Boogie Woogie and her newly-commissioned Violin Concerto No. 3 “Three Pieces for Anton” on its concert at the Lied Center for the Performing Arts in Lincoln, NE. Ruehr has written for large ensembles of voices and instruments across classical music. In addition to her orchestral works heard on O’Keeffe Images (below), she has also written an opera Toussaint Before the Spirits and her cantata Averno. She has taught at MIT since 1992. Her album O’Keefe Images (2014), recorded by the Boston Orchestra Project and included below, includes four works for orchestra: O’Keeffe Images, Shimmer, Vocalissimus, and Cloud Atlas.

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On April 17, Early Music America announced the release of a new album: Marianna Martines Complete Keyboard Works from pianist Idith Meshulam Korman, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey (Signum Classics, 2026). This is the first complete modern recording of all the surviving keyboard music of Marianna Martines. Martines was a composer, keyboard virtuoso, singer, and central cultural figure in elite circles of Viennese musical life in the 18th century. In 1773, she became the first woman to be admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna. WPA publishes the score and parts of her Sinfonia.

Below is a streamable version of the album, which is also available from Signum Classics.

On April 22–23, TIME TO ACT: A Live Opera Recording with Audience & Composer Laura Kaminsky will perform at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY. The opera’s world premiere and subsequent performances were recently staged by Pittsburgh Opera from February 28 –March 8, 2026. The opera features a group of high school students as they prepare for their production of Sophocles’ Antigone. They are joined by a new student, Alona, who comes with a formidable secret.

Composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist Crystal Manich have created an opera about how the arts can unify victims of trauma and empower them to act. It also centers the voices of young Americans who are some of the most affected by school violence. One of Kaminsky’s previous operas, As One, has become the most-produced modern opera in America.

On April 26, the Syracuse Chamber Orchestra presents its concert Women Composers Across the Centuries at CNY Arts in Syracuse, NY. Free and open to the public, it features the music of well-known historic women, including: Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Amy Beach, Maddalena Lombardini-Sirmen, Florence Price, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Emilie Mayer, and Princess Amalie von Prussia.

On April 24th–25th, the Boulanger Initiative and the Strathmore will co-present their 2026 Women Composers Festival: Transcend—All Day at the Mansion at The Mansion in North Bethesda MD. The event will feature two days of concerts, vendor exhibits, and composer workshops. Performers at the event will include: flutist Claire Chase, MacArthur Fellow and the first flutist to receive the Avery Fisher Prize; Maeve Gilchrist, a harper, composer, and improviser who blends traditional Scottish music with contemporary elements; Dr. Caiti Beth McKinney, Research Manager at the Boulanger Initiative; and the members of the Argus Quartet, who will play works by Shelley Washington, Molly Herron, Germaine Tailleferre, and Fanny Mendelssohn. Tickets are available for individual events or as a day pass, and the opening concert on the 24th is free and open to the public.

On April 26 the Women’s Orchestra of Arizona will perform its Queen of Hearts: A Royal Succession of Symphonic Voice concert at the North Scottsdale United Methodist Church in Scottsdale, Arizona. The concert will weave together eras of musical authority. It opens with Otto Nicolai’s Overture to the Merry Wives of Windsor, which celebrates the titular ladies of Shakespeare’s play. A new composition, Crepuscular Thread by Heather Pryse, follows as an example of contemporary music, and then Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 as the concert’s major work.

Amy Beach, ca.1887.
Photo by Baldwin Coolidge

On April 22 E. Douglas Bomberger gives the AMS Library of Congress Lecture: “Amy Beach: Path-Breaking American Musician.” The lecture is part of the AMS/Library of Congress Lecture Series. The Library of Congress holds the manuscripts of Beach’s Mass in E-Flat Major and her Gaelic Symphony as part of the A.P. Schmidt Company Archives, both of which were premiered by the Boston Symphony in the 1890s. Beach is the earliest female composer from the United States whose works are regularly heard today. Her works marked a number of firsts for women in American music: the Gaelic Symphony was the first symphony published by an American woman, and the Mass in E-Flat was the first piece by a woman to be performed by the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra. The Gaelic Symphony also secured her membership in the group called the Second New England School of composers, of whose members Beach was the only woman.

Bohdana Frolyak, composer

The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra has announced that it will give its next Invincible Tour in August 2026, as Ukraine begins its fifth year of resistance to Russian invasion. The ensemble’s founder and music director Keri-Lynn Wilson will lead the orchestra in programs of classics from the canon of Western art music in cities across Europe and North America. On each concert they will perform a new commission, a Gloria by acclaimed Ukrainian composer Bohdana Frolyak. The composer has dedicated the work “to all the heroes who have given their lives in this terrible war and to all who stand and defend Ukraine from this total evil.”

Finally, a non-musical observation — April 20, 2026 is the 60th anniversary of the first woman to run the Boston Marathon — Bobbi Gibb, who ran unofficially in 1966. Applying to enter the race (and already running 40 miles regularly), Gibb was told by officials:

We have received your request for an application for the Boston Marathon and regret that we will not be able to send you an application.

Women are not physiologically capable of running a marathon and we would not want to take on the medical liability…. The rules of International Sports and the Amateur Athletic Union, do not allow women to run races more than the sanctioned one and a half miles.

So women working in all fields can be inspired by those in the past who pursued their own dreams and goals, despite being told by authorities that they were not “capable” of doing what they were doing!

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Announced on April 7th, Anna Handler will be the Los Angeles Philharmonic's conductor-in residence. She will begin her three-year term with the orchestra in the 2026/27 season following Gustavo Dudamel's final season. Handler will spend three weeks each season conducting the orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl—favorite venues of the LA Phil. She will also be working with students from the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood. She currently serves as assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She was the first conducting student to receive the prestigious Kovner Fellowship at The Juilliard School, New York.

Mark Swed noted in The Los Angeles Times that the orchestra's collaborative team boasts many names from a who's-who of classical music; all those he names are men, and over 60. Handler will be an early thirty-something when she attains her post, which in addition to her experience conducting orchestras hailing from Boston, Ulster, and Berlin, and enthusiasm for combining music and technology will make her a bracing breath of fresh air for the ensemble. During the same 2026/27 season, Handler will also be Artist in Residence at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany. She will curate four concerts in the historic venue, where she will perform rotating roles of soloist, chamber musician, and conductor.

On April 18–19, the world premiere of Margaret Bonds's Bitter Laurel will be performed at Queens University (Charlotte, NC). Originally titled Lizzie, It is the first and only (so far!) musical and dramatic exploration of the life and legacy of Elizabeth Keckley, an enslaved woman who bought her freedom and eventually became a dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln. This is Bonds's final work, left unfinished at her death. The work will be presented as a staged workshop production—minimal staging, no props or costumes, and a narrator. In 2024 Dr. John Michael Cooper gave an interview about his and others' scholarly work reviving Bonds's legacy along with Florence Price's and other black women composers.

On April 16, the MSU Concert Orchestra at Wharton will perform Margaret Bonds’s classic Montgomery Variations, as well as the Philharmonic Fanfare for orchestral brass and percussion by Gina Gillie. The concert will also include selections of music by Respighi. The Philharmonic Fanfare is performed below by the Southern California Brass Consortium in 2023.

On April 19 at Severence Hall in Cleveland, OH the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra will give its 91st annual concert, featuring pianist Angelin Chang. They will perform the premiere of Sarah Hegenderfer’s Blood Moon for orchestra, as well as other works by Saint-Saëns, Franck, and Ravel. Hegenderfer is a composer of music for film, video games, and live concert performance. One of her early forays into orchestral composition, Clearing of Snow, was performed by the Akron Symphony earlier this year. Cleveland Classical described it as a “lovely little gem of a piece. . . [that] paints a winter scene at sunset in lush textures.” We look forward to hearing more orchestral work from her!

On April 17, the Chamber Orchestra of Boston performs a string orchestra concert, “American Views” in Boston. The COB’s repertoire explores ideas of America in music, including Lisa Nardi’s depiction of the desert and Florence Price’s soulful “Andante cantabile.” Nardi writes music for documentary and independent films, including the acclaimed Ken Burns series “The National Parks.” The concert will also offer listeners a chance to hear the rarely-performed serenade “The Far West” by British composer Granville Bantock (1868-1946). It seems that all of the USA was “The Far West” to Bantock, who quotes “Old Folks at Home” and “Yankee Doodle.”

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