Welcome to Our New Newsletter!
from Women's Philharmonic Advocacy
As August begins and the end of summer comes into view, it’s time to also get ready for the start of the 2024-2025 concert season. We at WPA thought it would be the right time to not only revive our newsletter, but to make it more accessible, useful, and relevant to our wonderfully diverse audience of folks who are all invested in equitable programming throughout the classical music world, but may be invested in different ways.
We’ll be publishing general information through this in particular, but also have different sections you can opt-in to depending on your particular interests. Stay tuned as we refine these different sections and share them with you.
We look forward to sharing with you news you can use - and plenty of music to discover - as we demand equity for women composers.
A Gift For You
We are happy to share with you a pay-wall free link to a recent article in The New York Times which discusses the work of Marianna Martines, whose Symphony in C will be performed by the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center.
The article highlights the work of conductor and WPA Board Member Nan Washburn, who first edited the piece for The Women’s Philharmonic. WPA Founder and President, Liane Curtis, is also interviewed in the article.
ICYMI
We have poured over, tallied, counted, and charted the repertoire of America’s “top” orchestras for the coming (2024-2025) concert season. This annual tradition provides a glimpse to what the most revered professional ensembles - and the ones with the largest budgets - are programming, as well as ignoring. Since they have the biggest endowments and the littlest to lose by taking risks, one would imagine that they would be the forerunners in making the systemic changes that the classical music community is calling for. You can read the full repertoire report here. (Spoiler: the overall trajectory of the inclusion of works by women composers is getting worse, not better.)
We also had a look at what was happening across the pond, and looked at all of the orchestral performances being presented at the 2024 BBC Proms. (More spoilers: it’s not much better than what we’re doing stateside.)
Publication News
Our catalogue of works by women composers is ever expanding, including works for chamber ensembles and full orchestras. Follow the link below to see the latest offerings.
Upcoming Concerts
Here are some notable events we are looking forward to:
The Lincoln Center Festival (formerly known as “The Mostly Mozart Festival”) will perform Marianne Martines’ Sinfonia in C major (1770), on their concerts August 6 and 7. Music by Caroline Shaw, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Felix Mendelssohn are also on the program. The Martines, quite probably the first symphony to be composed by a woman, is being performed from Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy’s edition by Nan H. Washburn, who first edited it in the 1980s for performance by The Women’s Philharmonic (then the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic). It was included on their first commercial CD, “Baroquen Treasures.”
In anticipation of the BBC Proms including a work by Vítězslava Kaprálová for the first time (her Military Sinfonietta on August 28), Bachtrak offers an engaging introduction to the composer “Maliciously witty: the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová,” based on an interview with Karla Hartl of The Vítězslava Kaprálová Society. A longer version of the interview is available here. Given Kaprálová’s significance, it is astounding that the enormous Proms festival has never before featured her music! Important women continue to remain “Hidden Figures.”
On Sunday August 11, the Bard Music Festival presents a concert titled “Women Musicians in Berlioz’s Time” at the Fischer Center in collaboration with Sing for Hope. The concert will feature music by Pauline Viardot, Louise Bertin, Clara Schumann, and three arias by Berlioz and Rossini made famous by Viardot and her sister Maria Malibran. Bertin’s chamber opera, La Esmeralda, and the other pieces will be presented in a semi-staged performance that imitates the salon atmosphere in which they would have been regularly performed in the nineteenth century. Tickets available here. — THE CONCERT WILL ALSO BE LIVESTREAMED HERE!!
Have a concert you want to be included in an upcoming newsletter? Let us know!