Xian Zhang, conductor Harrison Parrott HMU Elizabeth Rita /
There’s lots going on in the Pacific Northwest this week! Conductor Xian Zhang has officially taken the podium of the Seattle Symphony as its next music director. Zhang was the Seattle Symphony’s Music Director Designate during its 2024/2025 season, and she led the orchestra in programs featuring Holst’s The Planets in HD, a new concerto by American composer Billy Childs featuring saxophonist Steven Banks, and Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Hilary Hahn with Prokofiev’s triumphant Fifth Symphony. In addition to the 2025/26 season with the Seattle Symphony, Zhang will return to major American cities to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the St Louis Symphony. In Ottawa, she will also conduct at the National Arts Centre and in Europe, she will conduct the Amsterdam Concertgebouw for a performance broadcast on the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, and she will make her Verdi debut conducting Tosca at Finnish National Opera, following her huge success at the Metropolitan Opera in New York!
Melissa Dunphy, composer
On September 19–21 New Wave Opera (Portland, OR) will perform the West Coast premieres of two chamber operas by women composers. The first opera will be Alice Tierney (telling the story of the real-life Alice Tierney) by Melissa Dunphy and librettist Jacqueline Goldfinger. The opera was originally commissioned by Oberlin Conservatory Opera’s commissioning program, and premiered at Opera Columbus in April 2023. Dunphy was one of the seven winners of an OPERA America Discovery Grant in 2020 that helped support the development of the opera at Oberlin. The award is presented to female composers specifically to increase opportunities for women composers to compose and produce operas—an area that is still very far from gender parity.
The story of opera begins on a January evening in 1880, recalling the historical event when the title character was found strangled by her own petticoats on a Philadelphia fence. The police ruled the killing an accident and never investigated, despite suspicious circumstances. Four graduate students spend the opera attempting to uncover the truth. Today, Dunphy lives on the property; when she and Goldfinger learned about Tierney’s history and death they wanted to tell as much her story as possible.
The four fictional archaeology students that they have invented for the opera offer plenty of opportunities to rehearse the questions that the composers (and assuredly the audience) have about Tierney’s life and the circumstances of her death that, in a cold case, are unlikely to be answered.
Jessica Rudman, composer
The second opera is Marie Curie Learns to Swim (2018) by composer Jessica Rudman and librettist Kendra Preston Leonard. In the opera, it’s 1926 and Iréne Curie, the famed Nobel Prize winning physicist’s daughter, persuades her mother to vacation by the French seaside. While there, Marie begins to confront the (ultimately deadly) dangers of her groundbreaking radium research while remembers the difficulties and scandal surrounding her nomination to the French Academy of Science and the victory of her second Nobel Prize. The operas will be performed in English with supertitles. The 9/21 performance will include ASL interpretation. The operas are recommended for audiences 13 and up because the content includes short comedic profanity and a brief mention of sex work.
Caroline Shaw, composer
Founded by a pair of Portland Opera chorus singers, NWO showcases contemporary music by as diverse a group of today’s composers as it can, featuring accomplished singers accompanied by chamber ensembles.
On September 27, Orchestra Nova Northwest (the former Columbia Symphony) will open its 2025/26 season with Anna Clyne’s Sound and Fury and an orchestral version of Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte. ONN will pair the two contemporary works with a symphony by Haydn at the Mt. Hood Community College in Beaverton, near Portland.
Meanwhile, in Boston, an interdisciplinary chamber opera by Elisabet Curbelo, Ululations and Gurgles of the Invisible is is being staged Sept. 19, 20 and 21. This interdisciplinary work, developed and produced by Guerilla Opera in collaboration with the Urban Jazz Dance Company and Deaf artists, is based from poetry by Federico García Lorca. For soprano, piano, percussion, and dancers from the Deaf community, ASL is the driving force of the narrative.
ALSO in Boston, on Sat. Sept. 20 at 3 PM, Horizon Ensemble (one of our Grant winners) performs Germaine Tailleferre’s rarely heard Piano Concerto n. 1, composed in 1924 — the centenary of this vivacious work went unnoticed, and surprisingly there is only one recording, so since Horizon always streams their concerts (the Livestream will be here) and makes the video available later (Youtube channel) this is an exciting opportunity! Led by Music Director Julian Gau, with piano soloist Yuseok Seol, Pay-What-you Van tickets are HERE.
On September 12, cellist, sound designer, and composer Jo Quail announced that she has released a new atmospheric album, Notan (AdderStone Records). She has recorded and released the album via AdderStone, her own independent label, and it is also streamable via Bandcamp. The album showcases Quail’s experiments with the electric cello and other sound design elements, and has been called “a technical and creative marvel of an album.” She will be touring with the new album in the UK during September.
Below is the title track from the album, via the band camp streaming player. Performed and recorded by the composer.
Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org