We’re kicking off 2026 with a full slate of performances!
Credit: Beth Morrison Projects (BMP)
The Prototype Festival (NYC) will be mounting performances from January 7 – 18 at various venues in New York City. Two of the planned works that will be performed are Rima Fand’s Precipice (La Mama Experimental Theater Club, Jan 8–11) and Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Hildegard (Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, Jan 9–11, 14).
Precipice is an opera depicting one young woman’s struggle in the larger-than-life landscape of the American West. It explores themes of exile, connection, and seeking for a voice amid parallel environmental and emotional damages. Following the Saturday 1/10 performance will be a Q&A session with the all-female creative team: Rima Fand, composer; Susan Zeeman Rogers, Concept & Production Design; Karen Fisher, Libretto; Mallory Catlett, Director; and Mila Henry, Music Director. Snider’s Hildegard is a work of operatic historical fiction about twelfth-century German Benedictine abbess and polymath St. Hildegard von Bingen, and it follows her as she receives visions from God. Previously covered by WPA during its LA Opera run in November of 2025, Hildegard is more than a recount of the life of a famous woman saint and composer. Snider writes in her program note that it was important to her to “write an opera that was not only about Hildegard but about female relationships, collaborative, empowering relationships … I wanted this to be an opera about what it means to be yourself when being yourself comes into conflict with socially conditioned notions of right and wrong.” A Q&A session with the creative team—Sarah Kirkland Snider, Composer and Librettist; Elkhana Pulitzer, Director; and Gabriel Crouch, Music Director—will follow the Saturday 1/10 performance.
The Prototype Festival was co-founded in 2013 by BMP and the HERE Arts Center. It “offers living composers the support, guidance, and freedom to experiment, allowing them to create singularly innovative and impactful projects.” Tickets for festival events are available for in-person attendance and live streams from the online program.
British-born speaker and pianist Rachel Franklin has been a featured speaker for many organizations including the Library of Congress and NPR. She regularly presents programs that explore the intersections of classical music, jazz, film scores, and the broader fine arts. She will present a four-part series of themed courses on women composers for the Smithsonian in January/February 2026. Her first installment, “Great Composers,” on January 12th will investigate music by Hildegard of Bingen, Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Barbara Strozzi, Margaret Bonds, and Louise Farrenc. Many of these women are considered foundational to the canon of women composers, and were some of the first to be accepted in the mainstream canon of classical music. Her lectures will be presented via Zoom, and are available to stream with ticket purchase.
On January 10th and 11th at 3pm local time, the Zia Singers (Santa Fe) will present their winter concert, Voices of Life, Voices of Light, celebrates music written by female composers. This year’s installment featuring two large works: the cantata Everyday Wonders: The Girl from Aleppo by Cecilia McDowall and the world premiere of A Wave That Rocks Me by Santa Fe composer and member of Zia Singers, Susan Anders. The centerpiece work, McDowall’s cantata, describes the sixteenth-month journey from Syria to Germany of Nujeen Mustafa, a Kurdish teenager with cerebral palsy. She was seeking asylum when she traveled from Aleppo through eight countries, her sister Nasrine pushing her wheelchair.
Credit: Tiago Miranda/Expresso
On January 9th, composer Andreia Pinto Correia will be discussing her Portuguese heritage and its influence on her musical style ahead of PSO performances the following weekend. A quartet of musicians from the PSO will perform a selection of her works during the 1/9 talk, and her piece Ciprés (2018) for orchestra will be performed on 1/10 and 1/11 alongside works by Shostakovich & Prokofiev. Ciprés was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras and the Columbus Symphony, and supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. The Columbus Symphony Orchestra gave its premiere performance on April 6, 2018 conducted by Maestro Rossen Milanov. Based on a lesser-known minimalist poem by Federico García Lorca, Ciprés pairs different trees and states of water—each with its own section in the music.
Credit: Mikal George
On January 9–11, composer Gabriella Smith‘s Rewilding will appear on the LA Philharmonic program entitled “Promethius” alongside music by Debussy, Scriabin, and Sibelius. Her work originally premiered in June of 2025, and was originally commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, and the Barcelona Symphony. Rewilding begins with whimsical percussion sounds: swirling walnuts in metal mixing bowls, tapping with a variety of metal objects on another set of bowls and various metal objects, and clacking wooden mallets against the spokes of spinning bicycle wheels. The sounds are the first of many moments of joy and delight in Smith’s piece—she directs her players to “be messy,” to wiggle or bend notes, and to take inspiration from nature and question the conventions of order in which classical musicians are so often trained. Smith finds the continued presence of humans in the rewilding process essential to the piece; where some have interpreted the method as erasing evidence of human presence, in reality it demands human involvement to return the ecosystem to a stable and healthy state. She writes in her notes of rat apiece that “there are so many beneficial environmental results of rewilding, but the thing that keeps me coming back is pleasure: the pleasure of getting my hands in the dirt, of hearing northern flickers and Bewick’s wrens, of biking to and from the site (another climate solution that consistently brings me joy), and the pleasure of being part of something bigger.”
Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org