WPA News Digest – February 9, 2026

There’s lots to listen to in February!

Olga Neuwirth’s new opera Monster’s Paradise had its world premiere in Hamburg on February 1. Neuwirth, as described in The New York Times, “has spent her career composing music seeped in the fractious absurdity of contemporary life. Her compositions blend dizzying references to the classical repertoire and various popular traditions with eerily inventive — often electronic — sounds. The result is music that reflects a disorienting reality.” Seven years ago her opera Orlando (based on and updating Virginia Woolf’s novel) was the first piece by a woman composer to be performed at the Vienna State Opera. Monster’s Paradise is a notable departure from it. It freely mixes elements of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, political satire, and fantastical elements like Godzilla and two vampires standing in for the composer and librettist that seem like something in-between metaphorical absurdism and magical realism. Neuwirth has described her experience of writing as finding “inspiration and comfort from the rich history of artists mocking the powerful . . . draw[ing] on Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.” (NY Times, gift link) In addition to having plenty of inspiration from global politics, Neuwirth drew on her personal life and feelings of powerlessness. Her mother was gravely ill, and she found that the doctors who treated her contributed to her death, a horrible experience. Monster’s Paradise transmutes both personal agony and political strife into critique, cutting the powerful down to size.

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In other news, The Next Festival of Emerging Artists has announced its 14th season in 2026, May 29 through June 12 at the PS21 Center for Contemporary Performance in Chatham, NY; National Sawdust in Brooklyn; and Gibney Dance in New York City. The festival will coincide with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and will center the work of women immigrant composers. Among the featured artists and composers on its programs will be GRAMMY-nominated cellist and composer Andrea Casarrubios, Iranian-American composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh, festival alumna and Uzbek-American composer Adeliia Faizullina.

Below is a recording of Andrea Casarrubios’s work Herencia, performed by the The Next Festival string orchestra on June 8, 2024 at Merkin Hall (Kaufman Music Center), New York.

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Gabriela Ortiz, an acclaimed Mexican composer who regularly features in the pages of Feminist in the Concert Hall, continues to redefine contemporary classical music. At the 2026 Grammy Awards on February 1, Ortiz’s 2025 album Yanga was recognized in three categories: Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Compendium, and Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Dzonot, her concert for cello and orchestra (2024) won the award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, a distinction that also makes her the only composer yet to win the award in two consecutive years. The Best Choral Performance Award went to the album’s title track, Yanga, performed by Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale; Ortiz, Dudamel, the LA Phil, and the album’s producer Dmitriy Lipay were jointly awarded Best Classical Compendium. Ortiz’s music is available through Boosey & Hawkes. Heartfelt and well-deserved congratulations go to Dr. Ortiz, along with our excitement to hear what she’s working on next!

On January 31, the Minnesota Opera premiered My Name is Florence, a new opera by composer B.E. Boykin with a libretto by Harrison David Rivers. The opera is a product of the Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative, and it “tells Price’s life story in a series of vignettes, set to an original score, with only a brief interlude of Price’s own music. … “Florence” highlights Price’s childhood in Little Rock, her years at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and her time … in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. (A Frederick Stock character appears briefly on stage to mark the 1933 moment when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra asked to play Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor.)” (Chicago Sun-Times) I have to wonder about the limited inclusion of Price’s own music in the production. She is the subject of the opera, and as a new opera it is not autobiographical; even so, it seems a disappointing choice to only peripherally include her music in the work as a whole. Would an equivalent opera about Beethoven or Mendelssohn do the same?

Finally, a recording of Nkeiru Okoye’s Voices Shouting Out, for your listening this week, recorded in 2020 by Thomas Wilkins and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org