Hope your week is off to a great start!
On May 18 the Boston Orchestra Book Club presented its program “Sounds of the City,” a discussion and performance of pieces by three important Boston composers, led by OBC founder and Music Director Reuben Stern. Among them were Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee‘s first piano Sonata (1986) in the world premiere of the recent orchestration by her son, conductor David A. Rahbee. More on the Sonata in a future post, since WPA is publishing this exciting work! The other pieces were George W. Chadwick’s rapturous tone-poem Aphrodite, and Yvette Janine Jackson‘s Hello, Tomorrow! for orchestra and tape.
Hello, Tomorrow! brought the concert into the twenty-first century. It draws both inspiration and expertise from Jackson’s extensive work as a theater sound designer, blending writing for acoustic instruments and electronics. Commissioned by the American Composers’ Orchestra, it was inspired by George Lefferts’s science fiction story that aired on NBC Radio’s X Minus One program in 1956. Lefferts’s original story takes place after a fictional “Third Atomic War,” and in the post-apocalyptic landscape humans have to rebuild civilization underground. Over time they lost tolerance for those deemed “genetically inferior.” Jackson’s piece has taken inspiration from this story to consider the harms of human inaction in the world around us and how positive change might still be possible. Here is the world premiere recording, led by conductor Mei Ann Chen in 2023
The Houston Grand Opera and the London Symphony Orchestra have announced a new partnership project in 2025: the newly-launched Houston Grand Opera recording label will partner with the LSO Live label to bring American opera to a larger international audience. The partnership is LSO Live’s first-ever collaboration with a U.S. opera company, and two of the project’s first productions will feature collaborative operas with women. A recording of Marcela Fuentes-Berain’s (librettist) and Daniel Catán’s opera Florencia en el Amazonas (1996, commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera) will be released later this year. It was originally captured during the 2019 revival of the opera, and features the talents of Ana María Martínez (soprano). Another release will be the first-ever recording of Breaking the Waves, a 2016 opera by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, which was recorded in Spring 2025.
Opera has historically been a difficult arena for women composers, and we hope that these two collaborations will be the first of many works by women that we hear from this partnership!
On May 29th, Marin Alsop will lead the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s Concert of Peace. She will lead the Sarajevo and Dayton Philharmonic Orchestras in a concert of perform multiple pieces, all focusing on the theme of peace, including: Bernstein’s overture to Candide, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony Disappointingly, no works by women are appearing on the concert—perhaps Alsop did not get to choose the repertoire this time around.
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