Women’s Orchestra of Arizona
We’ve gathered some interesting news to start your week!
On Sunday April 27, 2025 at 3PM local time, the Women’s Orchestra of Arizona will give the final performance of their 2024/25 season. Their program, titled “Spring Awakening,” has been billed as a “carnival of music” and will feature Hector Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Between them the orchestra will play the premiere of Susan Kowalske’s Unstoppable—the winning piece of WOA’s Composition Competition. Kowalske’s piece was inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women, and celebrates women who do vital work behind the scenes in daily life. Kowalske wants to pay tribute to their sacrifices, devotion, resilience, and quiet strength that often goes unnoticed.
On April 10, 11, and 12, Marin Alsop will lead the San Francisco Symphony in a program of Music from the Americas that features three women composers from the United States, Venezuela, and Mexico. The program will feature Gabriela Ortiz‘s Antrópolis; Gabriela Montero‘s Piano Concerto No. 1, “Latin,” with the composer as soloist in its first San Francisco Symphony performance; Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man; Joan Tower‘s classic Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman; and Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1. Alsop’s program is designed to capture the grandeur, seriousness, diversity, and joy of music in the Western hemisphere.
Ortiz‘s Antrópolis (2019) is a tone poem depicting the nightlife of Mexico City through its dance clubs. In former years in Mexico the term “antro” specifically referred to bars or entertainment places with dubious reputations; in twenty-first century parlance, it refers to a nightclub of any style. Ortiz wanted to paint a very personal portrait of the city with sound by evoking its dance halls, nostalgia for live dance orchestras and rumberas, and dance scenes from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Played here by the Orquesta Sinfónia de Minería, the piece is an homenaje a los Salones de Baile de la Ciudad de México (“tribute to the dance salons of Mexico City.”)
Montero‘s Concerto combines pan-Latin dance rhythms with classic gestures from the piano concerto repertoire. In her program note for the piece, she writes that, “When most people think of Latin America, they imagine a place where life, like the music, is full of rhythm, sensuality and primitive energy. I know it’s appealing to market Latin America as a bubbly, fun paradise. But there are dark shadows over it all that can stop us from seeing clearly. These are the shadows of violence and corruption that have prevented some Latin American countries from reaching their full potential. This is the story I wanted to tell; this is why my Latin Concerto shows the complexities of South American life. I don’t want the common perception of Latin Americans to obscure the daily reality of what’s happening in some South American nations. They are not always agents of their own destiny.” It’s clear why Alsop wanted to include a piece that address the complexities of Latin American life and that so openly speaks against stereotypes of peoples and countries south of the Rio Grande on a program of music from the Americas. In this recording from the George Enescu Festival at Bucharest Radio Hall in 2021, the composer leads the concerto with John Axelrod and the Bucharest Symphony Orchestra.
Joan Tower‘s classic Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman is a series of six fanfares. Many ensembles play single movements as stand-alone pieces; Alsop’s program does not specify which fanfare—perhaps she plans to play all six? (We can hope.) She has paired it with Aaron Copland’s classic Fanfare for the Common Man—inspired by then-Vice President Henry Wallace’s speech proclaiming the “century of the common man” in 1942. Tower wrote the six separate pieces in the series of Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman for different sizes and configurations of ensemble over a 27-year period (1987–2014), and each was commissioned by a different orchestra. She wrote 1–5 from 1987–1993, and 6 in 2014. Pieces 1 and 2 mirror Copland’s Fanfare and are scored for orchestral brass and percussion; 3 and 5 are scored for brass ensembles (double brass quintet and trumpet quartet, respectively); and 4 and 6 are scored for full orchestra. Both Copland’s and Tower’s fanfares are regularly programmed for their audience appeal—it’s quite fun to see and hear the brass sections play at full power that so often have to sit quietly through pieces where strings and winds take center stage. Tower has described the fanfares as a tribute to “women who take risks and are adventurous.” Each of the six fanfares is dedicated to an inspiring woman in music: 1) Marin Alsop, 2) Joan Briccetti, 3) Frances Richard, 4) JoAnn Falletta, 5) Joan Harris, and 6) Tania Leon.
Below is the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing Tower’s original fanfare (No. 1) in a recording form July, 2024.
Opera North (Leeds, UK) has issued a Call for Applications to Women and Non-Binary Conductors based in the UK for their 10-week training program during the organizations 2025/26 Winter Season. The scheme provides wide-ranging training and support within the UK’s national opera company to help address the gender imbalance in classical music. Applications close at 10:59 pm local time on Monday April 7, 2025. In addition to being a fantastic opportunity for young conductors, at WPA we hope to see great work and representation from trainees in the years following their work.
Divine Art is issuing a new recording of cello music by women composers, A Cello Galaxy of British Women Composers, which will be available in June 2025. Cellist Catherine Wilmers and pianist Jill Morton have recorded music by ten British women composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Alice Verne-Bredt, Amy Elsie Horrocks, Dora Bright, Elizabeth Poston, Ethel Barns, Joan Trimble, Peggy Spencer Palmer, Rebecca Clarke, Sarah Rodgers, and Susan Spain-Dunk. Though the pieces are small-scale chamber works for cello and piano and not for orchestra, they and their composers mark an important turning point in social attitudes toward composition and performance by women in the UK. These women were working at a time when social anxieties about women playing instruments that could be considered sexually provocative or “unfeminine” were beginning to change—the violin had seen similar changes not long before—and their music represents an important milestone in the history of women playing instruments in public. The recording builds on one the pioneering Wilmers released 25 years ago, that is now long out of print.
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