There’s lots of listen to and celebrate leading up to International Women’s Day!
On March 8, 2025 BBC Radio 3 will have a full day of live streamable programming to celebrate International Women’s Day. “Saturday Morning” (9 AM — all times are local UK times) will feature soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan; “Music Matters (1 PM) will hear Jude Kelly and Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason speaking about the impact of families on the careers of women composers; “Record Review (2 PM) will include the importance of Clara Schumann’s lieder in building a personal record library; “Sound of Cinema” (4 PM) is devoted to celebrating women in film music; “Opera on 3” (6 PM) will broadcast Ethel Smyth’s one-act opera Der Wald; “Radio 3 in Concert” (7:30 PM) will feature works by composers Olga Neuwirth, Sofia Gubaidulina, Sarah Gibson, and Emilie Mayer; and to round out the broadcast day both “Music Planet” (9:45 PM) and “New Music Show” (10:45 PM) hosts Lopa Kothari and Kate Molleson offer a collection of music by women composers and musicians. All times are local UK times, and all programs are streamable free via BBC Radio 3 in a web browser or the BBC Sounds app.
The Community Women’s Orchestra of Oakland, CA is celebrating 40 years of women making orchestral music in 2025. The community orchestra was founded in 1985 as an arm of the professional Women’s Philharmonic, then based in San Francisco. The CWO is one of only a handful of all-women’s orchestras in the US that have managed to persist from their historical heyday. The CWO plays two concerts to commemorate the anniversary: the first on March 2 ahead of International Women’s Day, and a second to be announced. The March 2 concert will feature Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 in G Minor.
Below is a recording of Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3, performed by the Radio France Philharmonic orchestra conducted by Mikko Franck in 2018.
In honor of Women’s History Month, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra features a digital exhibit of writing and events by women composers, performers, and conductors, from past online writings.
As previously reported in Feminist in the Concert Hall, the National Symphony Orchestra hosted the all-female Lorelei Ensemble in performances of Julia Wolfe‘s Her Story— a large-scale choral work with texts drawn from letters written by women of the suffrage movement —February 27 to March 1, 2025 conducted by Marin Alsop. The piece is a 40-minute oratorio for ten voices whose libretto is made of excerpts from various texts in women’s history, including: a letter written by Abigail Adams, words attributed to Sojourner Truth, spoken public attacks directed at women protesting for the right to vote, and political satire. Wolfe’s interview with NPR describes her inspiration for the work in detail, and acknowledges the debt she has to trailblazers like Joan Tower, Tania León, and Meredith Monk.
Below is an excerpt of Her Story, performed by the Lorelei Ensemble with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2023.
The Scottsdale [Arizona] Symphonic Orchestra will present works by three women on its Women’s History Month concert on March 23, 2025 at 4 PM at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. Alongside Rimsky-Korsakov’s classic Scheherazade—a work regularly programmed for its heroine’s strategic mind and storytelling ability—the orchestra will play Roar! by Maria Grenfell, “Soul of Remembrance” from the orchestral suite Five Movements in Color by Mary Watkins, and Dòchas by Laura Pettigrew. All three pieces are included below.
Maria Grenfell’s Roar!, performed by the Concordia Orchestra and conducted by Kevin Sütterlin, November 2023. Concordia College, MN.
Mary Watkins’s “Soul of Remembrance,” performed by The New Black Music Repertory Ensemble and conducted by Leslie B. Dunner and recorded on Albany Records’ Recorded Music of the African Diaspora (TROY 1200) is linked below. Excerpts from Watkin’s opera Dark River: The Fannie Lou Hamer Story can be viewed on her website. Dark River is the second of Watkins’ three (so far!) full-length operas: Queen Clara (2005), Dark River (2009), and Emmett Till, The Opera (2019). These operas and the Suite for Orchestra are not the only media where listeners will find Watkins’ music: she also composed for over 20 film and television productions from 1986–2001.
Laura Pettigrew’s Dòchas, performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Keri-Lynn Wilson at Roy Thomson Hall, 2018.
Margaret Brouwer, composer
Photo Credit: Ken Blaze
As WPA has previously reported, the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra will perform its 90th Anniversary Concert at Severance Music Center on Sunday, March 30 at 3:30. The concert will feature the work of three local soloists: Olga Dubossarska Kaler, (violin), Eleanor Pompa (cello), and Emanuela Friscioni (piano). It will also feature a piece by Cleveland composer Margaret Brouwer entitled Path at Sunrise, Masses of Flowers, a piece originally commissioned for the orchestra’s 75th anniversary in 2010 through a “Meet the Composer” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s easy to hear why Brouwer is a leading figure in contemporary American composition. Her lyrical piece draws on themes of appreciating the ephemeral beauty of nature at sunrise in all of the lush sound possibilities that an orchestra has to offer. The piece has moments of quiet delicacy and sweeping gestures that seem to imagine all parts of a landscape, from the smallest plant to the widest open sky. At the same time, her work is not trading in tropes of conventional American “landscape music.” (I’m thinking of Aaron Copland’s classics, but affectionately.) She has skipped the grandiosity that she could have leaned into in favor of joy, particularly in her percussion writing. She favors bells and bright, sparkling sounds instead of massive drum beats and cymbal crashes, and this leaves enough air in the room for the strings and the winds to take the spotlight too. Here is a composer who knows how to keep an orchestra in balance.
Below is a recording of Path at Sunrise, Masses of Flowers, recorded for the NAXOS label by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2024 and conducted by Marin Alsop.
Let us know what you’re listening to for International Women’s Day! Email us at [email protected]