There’s lots to listen to this week!
Conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson had been scheduled to perform composer Vita Poleva’s latest work Sophia at Kyiv’s Philharmonic Hall, in early November 2025. The concert was cancelled at the last minute due to a Russian bomb attack. Wilson interviewed Poleva just before the cancelled concert (video below). Poleva is one of the leading composers of the current Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression. She was in Bucha in eastern Ukraine in 2022 as Russian tanks rolled in to occupy the city, and her powerful orchestral tone poem Bucha Lacrimosa was born from her experiences. The planned concert at Kyiv’s Philharmonic Hall has been rescheduled for December 2nd.
A moving 2024 performance of Bucha Lacrimosa is here.
On November 23rd, the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra performed Gabriela Ortiz’s orchestral tone poem Kauyumari (“blue deer”) on its late November program. (The concert also included works by Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Dvořák). Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2021, the title Kauyumari refers to a spiritual guide in Huichol folklore, whom spiritual seekers encounter on a kind of vision quest while under the ritual influence of peyote. They may undertake a symbolic journey of “hunting the blue deer” during which they are granted access to a spiritual realm inaccessible during normal life; by passing through it they are able to heal spiritual wounds and receive insight.
Below is a recording of Ortiz’s Kauyumari by the New World Symphony in October, 2022. It includes a video recording from the NWS’s archives of the composer delivering her notes on the piece before the performance.
Louise Farrenc, composer
On November 26th & 27th, the Musikkollegium Winterthur conducted by Jan Willem de Vriend will perform Louise Farrenc’s Overture no. 2 in E flat major, Op.24 and Emilie Mayer’s Symphony no. 7. at the Stadthaus in Zurich, Switzerland. The program will also include Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for winds in E flat major.
Marin Alsop and Anna Sułkowska-Migoń conduct the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra on November 28th and December 4th at its hall in Wojciech Kilar Square in Katowice. Their concert The Cry of the Innocent will include Chaya Czernowin’s No! A Lament for the Innocent (NOSPR co-commission, Polish premiere) and Grażyna Bacewicz’s Violin Concerto No 1. (The program also includes Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica). Czernowin’s NO! was written in explicit response to the “zero-tolerance” policies of undocumented immigration put in place in the United States in 2018 under the first Trump administration. Under those policies, both undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers were detained in closed facilities under abhorrent conditions, including children younger than five being separated from their parents. Additional reasons for protest have emerged since, including Israeli policies that criminalize and destroy Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. The composer writes that her work expresses the rage that “starts deep inside the body and pushes outward […] as if the scream is a creature made of pain, using its limbs to swim upward, from the caves of the body into the open air.” (From the composer’s program note.) Bacewicz’s concerto offers counterbalancing qualities to Czernowin’s unflinching expression of the horrors of bureaucratic indifference. Bacewicz instead expresses tranquility, joy, and the best, happiest hopes we all have for the innocence of childhood and the quiet normalcy of domestic life.
Below is a recording of Joanna Kurkowicz playing the first movement of Bacewicz’s concerto with the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra (not to be confused with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra—they’re two different groups!) from her 2009 Chandos Records recording.
Marin Alsop was also on the ball as she conducted “Balls,” Laura Karpman’s opera (with a libretto by Gail Collins) that was premiered on Nov. 20 in London in its fully orchestrated version, played by Philharmonia. The opera dramatizes the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” – a highly publicized tennis match between chauvinist former men’s champion Bobby Riggs and the reigning women’s champion Billie Jean King. We are hopeful there will be more performances, since it was well received — declared “the winner” in the Financial Times, and the Guardian enthused “Karpman excels at …keeping the audience entertained.”
The first recording to feature the orchestral music of Avril Coleridge-Taylor has just been released! It features Dr. Samantha Ege as the soloist in the Piano Concerto, and also other works, mostly never before recorded, with John Andrews leading the BBC Philharmonic. Ege has written a feature article about Avril Coleridge-Taylor in the Guardian and Ege teams up with author Leah Broad for a podcast about Avril, presented by Gramophone. We look forward to hearing this music and learning about this long-neglected composer!
Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org