Xian Zhang
Harrison Parrott
HMU Elizabeth Rita / assistant Mariona Vilaros / studio Ermine London
Our big news this week is the Seattle Symphony’s announcement that Xian Zhang will be its next music director beginning in the 2025/26 season! This appointment distinguishes her as the first woman conductor to head a major orchestra on the US West Coast. Zhang will become music director designate during the 2024/25 season, and begin the first year of her five-year contract in the autumn of 2025. She first conducted the SSO in 2008 in a performance of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and has returned several times since, recently for Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in 2023 and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring in April of 2024. Zhang has directed the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra for the past eight seasons, and won a 2023 Grammy Award for her direction on a recording of music by Jennifer Higdon and Kevin Puts with the Time for Three String Trio and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Sofia Ouyang, composer
Credit: www.sfcmp.org
Two women are among those featured in the ARTZenter Institute Emerging Composer Program in San Francisco. ARTZenter Institute is a newly-established grant program partnered with the SF Contemporary Players. Sofia Ouyang and Laura Cetilia will have premieres of their new works for orchestra performed at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco—Cetilla’s Unless (2024) and Ouyang’s Burst (2024). Both pieces are for “traditional orchestra” (i.e., a large orchestra with traditional instrumentation; neither a smaller
Laura Cetilia, composer Credit: www.sfcmp.org
chamber orchestra nor an expanded orchestra with alternative or avant-garde instruments). Funds for the initiative came from Tony Magee—founder of Petaluma California’s Lagunitas Brewing Company—for the purpose of encouraging workshops, mentorship and performance opportunities for young composers of orchestral music. This will be a public reading and lab session on September 12.
Poiema Trio
Credit: ArsNova, Boston
On September 28, 2024 the Poiema Trio will present an evening celebrating women in music, “The Voices of Female Composers,” as the opening of ArsNova’s 2024/25 concert season at the Newton Presbyterian Church in Newton, Massachusetts. They will perform Cécile Chaminade‘s Piano Trio No. 1 in G Minor and Clara Schumann‘s Piano Trio in G Minor. Poiema recently won the gold medal at the Ninth International Chamber Music Ensemble Competition (2024, Chamber Music Foundation of New England).
From September 26–29, composer Paola Prestini’s chamber opera Silent Light will receive its world premiere at the opening of the 10th Anniversary Season of National Sawdust. This is the beginning of a busy season for the composer, who has announced five world premieres of opera and music-theater works across the United States. National Sawdust, of which Prestini is a founding member (2015), is known for modeling equitable and inclusive programming of classical music and is one of the handful of women-led institutions of classical music in the city. We’ll be tracking the progress of Prestini’s premieres throughout the season.
(Below): National Sawdust’s celebration for the release of Season 4 of Mozart in the Jungle, playing Hi by Caroline Shaw.
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