October, 2024: Women on the Podium Symposium Week. Photo Credit: Perth Symphony
We have a range of exciting news this week!
From April 10–13, 2025, the Perth Symphony Orchestra hosted its Women on the Podium initiative, a comprehensive symposium that promotes women’s leadership and directorship in music (focusing on but not limited to, building conducting skills). The 2025 faculty mentors included Kris Bowtell (AU), Alice Farnham (UK), and Jessica Gethin (AU). Mentors help participants develop their conducting skills while also considering musicianship and leadership, at various levels of development. Scholars can participate as Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced conductors, and all have a place at the symposium. This helps assure that networking happens between leaders of different skill levels and stages of career. The symposium opened with a screening of Mozart’s Sister, the 2024 Australian documentary film directed by Madeleine Hetherton-Miau about Maria Anna Mozart, accompanied by a panel discussion. Panelists Alice Farnham, Claire Nankivell (WoP Intermediate Scholar, 2023), and Pia Harris led the discussion following the film, aimed at both acknowledging collective progress in getting more women into music leadership and taking stock of the work still to be done.
The symposium is only the beginning! Participants have chances to become 2025 Scholars and gain further opportunities to study throughout the rest of the year, as well as opportunities to collaborate with UWACS (the University of Western Australia Choral Society). We look forward to hearing great things from them the rest of the year!
Composer Chen Yi
The LunArt Festival has announced its 2025 Call For Scores winners: Lingbo Ma, Stella G. Gitelman Willoughby, and Jennifer Margaret Barker. It has also announced its Composers Hub Cohort: Yunmeng Wang, Megan DiGeorgio, Soeui Lee, Shengran Jin, Yilin Wang, and Kei Wing Chan. The festival will take place in Madison, WI from May 28 – June 1, and will highlight the work of composer-in-residence Dr. Chen Yi. The festival’s gala concerts will feature her music, and she’ll be leading the 2025 Composers Hub.
LunART was founded in 2018 and sponsors wide array of year-round events, both online and in person, to benefit women artists in music!
Cover of Sebba’s The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz
In March of 2025 historian, journalist, and author Anne Sebba published her most recent book, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival. (Orion, 2025) Sebba has done extensive archival research and examination of firsthand accounts to bring forward this book about the only entirely-female orchestra in the Nazi prison camps. For nearly all of the musicians drafted to participate, playing in this orchestra would save their lives. Nearly fifty women and girls were assembled into an orchestra that would play several times a day, both for the inmates and for the Nazi officers. Sebba has given a number of in-depth interviews to promote her work in recent weeks including for BBC: Front Row and for The Human Risk podcast. (Both links allow for listening.)
On Sunday May 4th, the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra will perform Mascagni’s one-act opera Zanetto with members of the Cleveland Opera at the Tudor Arms Hotel Grand Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio.
On Sunday May 18, the Community Women’s Orchestra of Oakland will present the final concert of its 2024/25 season, “Folk Songs of the Four Seasons” for their 40th anniversary. Among the British selections on the program will be the overture to Dame Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers.
AND finally, just to follow up on our recent Amy Beach coverage, the concert by Pegasus: the Orchestra, with piano soloist Asiya Korepanova, got this glowing review in The New York Classical Review, that focuses on Beach’s Concerto: “Pegasus excavates an American rarity with Beach concerto.” Korepanova “approached the concerto’s sweeping themes with Rachmaninoff-like rubato and intensity, bringing out its emotional charge…. [Conductor Karén] Hakobyan shaped the concerto with a firm sense of pacing, allowing Beach’s formal architecture to come through.” Brava, tutti, for bringing this work to light so brilliantly!
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