Wow! Exciting news to start the week!
Helen Hopekirk, composer
Scotland’s International Helen Hopekirk Competition & Festival has announced its 2026 dates. The festival will take place from May18–24 at venues in Glasgow & Edinburgh; the live Piano and Organ Competition in Edinburgh on May 22–23; and the Online Competition in Piano, Organ, and Composition on September 10. This year’s festivities honor the composer’s 170th anniversary as well as her artistic legacy. Hopekirk was a Scottish-American pianist, composer, and pedagogue active at the turn of the twentieth century. She studied at the Leipzig Conservatory (1876–78) and in Vienna, and later made her debut with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1878. She later moved to Boston where she performed with the Boston Symphony and taught at the New England Conservatory. AND we publish Hopekirk’s dramtic Concertstück for Piano and Orchestra in D Minor, whcih Hopekirk premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1904. You can hear the 2015 revival by Gary Steigerwalt and the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra:
The International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) is calling for scores from its current members in its annual Search for New Music (SNM). The call is open until May 4, 2026. The IAWM holds the annual composition competition for new and veteran Alliance members who identify as women and non-binary composers, and it includes several prize categories ranging from chamber and orchestral works to electroacoustic media, improvisation, and sound installation.
Andrea Casarrubios, cellist & composer
The Next Festival of Emerging Artists (“NextFest”) has been announced for May 29–June 12, 2026. The 2026 festival marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and will spotlight women immigrant composers who have shaped the American sound. The centerpiece of the festival will be GRAMMY®-nominated cellist/composer Andrea Casarrubios and her new double concerto for cello, percussion, and strings. Casarrubios also recently expanded her 2024 concerto MIRAGE for Cello and Orchestra for the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, which they performed together on April 25th, 2025. Her concerto work as both composer and performer draws a lot of inspiration from the cultural duality of being a Spanish-American woman and the cosmopolitan, multi-city nature of her career.
Below is a recording of Casarrubios’s original version of MIRAGE for cello and chamber orchestra, performed by cellist Amit Peled with the Mount Vernon Virtuosi.
Image from nytimes.com
The Curtis Institute of Music has announced that Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe will be the 2026-27 composer-in-residence with the Curtis New Music Ensemble (CNME). Among her many other accolades, Wolfe is currently the artistic director of the CNME. The second concert of the CNME’s year (date TBA) will be Portrait of Julia Wolfe, and will celebrate her work and career as a composer. Wolfe is a prominent, influential voice in US contemporary music and among women composers, and a WPA favorite. She is a winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music, a 2016 MacArthur fellowship, and Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year award. Her music blends the timbres and techniques of classical music with influences from folk music, rock/popular music, and aspects of minimalism . She’s known for music that defies genre expectations. Her oratorio Anthracite Fields, for which she won the 2015 Pulitzer, uses a chorus and sextet to evoke the experiences and emotions of coal-mining life in Pennsylvania near the turn of the 20th Century.
Composer Florence Price
On May 1, the Minnesota Orchestra will perform Florence Price’s The Heart of a Woman with orchestration by Lior Rosner as part of its program More to Hear: The Listening Project. Begun on 2021, the goal of the project is to present and record high-quality performances of music by obscure or underrepresented composers; as the project has progressed, the orchestra has trained the project on under-recorded works as well. Florence Price, whose music has been undergoing a rediscovery and revival in recent years, has a number of works for orchestra—such as her first symphony—that are concert-ready, and those have been in heavy rotation given the popularity of her music with audiences. I admit to some curiosity about why the Minnesota Orchestra is working with an orchestration of Price’s work by another composer, especially given the recent controversy involving a forgery of her Rainbow Waltz performed by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and Viennese composer/conductor Wolfgang Dörner earlier this year. Dr. Michael Cooper, a scholar and longtime champion of Price’s work, has detailed the controversy and highlighted the problems it exposes several times for publication, collected in this digest post. I expect that a twofold reason for the collaborative orchestration is the MO’s desire to present a less-performed piece by Price, and that such a piece should have a prominent singer. (Fine motivations, all.) The program notes, which are available on the Minnesota Orchestra’s website, describe the orchestration as “curated and orchestrated by Lior
Elena Ruehr, composerRosner.” It draws from Price’s repertoire of nearly 100 songs for voice and piano, and the songs are selected from a larger collection of 44 art songs and spirituals. I hope that in future recordings the MO will make its reasons and methods surrounding the new orchestration explicit in light of the forgery that has been performed in Price’s name.
On May 2, the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra will perform composer-in-residence Elena Ruehr‘s Broadway Boogie Woogie and her newly-commissioned Violin Concerto No. 3 “Three Pieces for Anton” on its concert at the Lied Center for the Performing Arts in Lincoln, NE. Ruehr has written for large ensembles of voices and instruments across classical music. In addition to her orchestral works heard on O’Keeffe Images (below), she has also written an opera Toussaint Before the Spirits and her cantata Averno. She has taught at MIT since 1992. Her album O’Keefe Images (2014), recorded by the Boston Orchestra Project and included below, includes four works for orchestra: O’Keeffe Images, Shimmer, Vocalissimus, and Cloud Atlas.
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