Two more exciting concerts you don’t want to miss! A rare performance of Helen Hagan’s recently rediscovered — and just published by us, WPA — Concerto in C minor, takes place and STREAMS tomorrow, Thursday May 7, at 7:30 PM (Eastern Time). The streaming link is here! The Miami University Symphony Orchestra performs, led by Ricardo Averbach, with piano soloist Michael Chertock. More information is here. Titled “Women Composers Reframe the Classical Tradition: From Bach to Beethoven and Beyond” the concert includes a J.S.Bach-inspired work by Clarice Assad: Suite for Lower Strings. Also on the program is the exuberant Fiesta No. 3 by Sonia Morales-Matos.
Hagan premiered her Concerto in 1912, when she also became the first Black woman to graduate from the Yale School of Music. She was recognized by Yale with a prestigious Fellowship that allowed her to study in France after her graduation. As Dr. Samantha Ege has stated: “While Florence Price is celebrated as the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major national orchestra, Hagan’s achievements show that Black women were composing large-scale orchestral works much earlier. To me, Hagan’s life and music suggest a much longer history of Black female symphonic composers—even if we don’t necessarily know their names. But Hagan evidences the depths of this hidden history.” –from an Interview with Ege, 2022, on the occasion of the premiere of the revived Hagan Concerto, as orchestrated by Soomin Kim. This premiere also received extensive coverage in the Washington Post. 
While the revival of the Concerto has taken place in New Haven, with three performances of the re-constructed orchestration (the work survives only in a two-piano version), tomorrow’s performance will be the first outside of New Haven. Miami University is in Oxford, Ohio in the southwest part of the state.
Another exciting concert will be presented on Saturday May 9, by Symphony Tacoma (7:30 pm Pacific time) — Maestro Sarah Ioannides concludes her tenure as Music Director with a concert featuring a world premiere of Elise Winkler’s: Metamorphosis. Ordinally from western Washington State, Winkler has degrees from Juilliard and is now working on her Doctoral degree at Yale. We have a hunch that Metamorphosis is a trombone concerto (the concert features trombone soloist Scott Hartman).