JoAnn Falletta, conductor
Credit: International Conductors Guild
As summer ends and fall educational and concert activities ramp back up, a lot of exciting news!
From Sept. 15 – 18, The Buffalo Philharmonic and the International Conductors Guild will host a workshop for eight women conductors in Buffalo, New York. The four-day workshop will include roundtable discussions with JoAnn Falletta, Music Director of the BPO since 1999; two days of rehearsals; and a final performance with the BPO. Keith Lockhart, current conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra and Director of the Brevard Music Center, will also be leading sections of the workshop. The eight participants will have opportunities to work with Falletta and Lockhart on different facets of leadership and running an orchestra as an organization in addition to honing their already-noteworthy conducting skills.
Mathilde Calderini (flute) and Aurèle Marthan (piano) have released a new album, Avec Elles (available from prestomusic.com) celebrating the work of four French women composers plus three works by Debussy and Poulenc that were inspired by women. The album includes Cecile Chaminade’s Concertino pour flûte et piano, Op. 107; Louise-Marie Simon’s Sonatine pour flûte et piano which was published under her pseudonym Claude Arrieu; Mel Bonis’ Sonate pour flûte et piano, Op. 64; and Lise Borel’s single-movement Miroir pour flûte et piano, which Calderini and Marthan commissioned. This video features the first movement, “Andantino con moto,” of Bonis’ Sonate:
The Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra will perform as part of the Witches? music festival from Monday, September 16 to Thursday, September 19. Violinist Susanne Scholz and pianist Gili Loftus will appear with the orchestra at various points during the festival, leading its programs of women’s music. The JBO is featuring music by and about women to show the different musical roles that women could play during the Baroque era; modern emphases on public performances and published/authored compositions often erase women from the history of music. Scholtz cites Maria Anna Mozart (affectionately “Nannerl,” the composer’s older sister), Anna Maria dal Violin (an orphan who studied and performed with Vivaldi at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice), and Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen (who studied with Tartini, more about Sirmen in our blog posts here and also here) as her inspirations, in addition to Clara Schumann and also the intellectual joy of playing early music.
Brittany J. Green, composer
Credit: brittanyjgreen.com
On September 27–28, the Jacksonville Symphony will present its Virginia B. Toulmin Commission Concert. It will give the world premiere of a piece for orchestra by Brittany J. Green, commissioned by the League of American Orchestras with support from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, under the baton of Music Director Courtney Lewis. The composer, Brittany J. Green, is a performer and educator based in North Carolina. Through her compositions, she aims to create musical spaces that encourage collaboration and emotional intimacy. She is also interested in intersections between movement, sound, text, and video; she strives to center the musical spaces she creates on these intersections, the better to question and consider what we know about their relationships. Such relationships gesture at the systems, theories, and thinking—including sonification and black feminist theory—that underpin her work.
Following the Jacksonville performance, four other member orchestras of the 30-orchestra consortium that perform works commissioned by the Toulmin Foundation will perform the work. Currently the Fayetteville Symphony Orchestra is scheduled to perform it on February 22, 2025— it makes sense that they would jump at the change to premiere work by a composer from North Carolina. Three other ensembles will be announced. The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program for Women Composers is an initiative of the League of American Orchestras and the American Composers Orchestra. Included here is the 2022 short film Thresh and Hold featuring Marlanda Dekine (poetry and voice), Brittany J. Green (sound and music), and Mahkia Greene (videography); produced by Castle of our Skins.
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