Tickets on sale soon
$20 general admission
Students free (ticket required)
Mead Witter School of Music Faculty Artist Series
Works by Laura Schwendinger with
Conor Nelson, flute
Sarah Brailey, soprano
Oriol Sans, conductor
Christopher Taylor, piano
Sally Chisholm, viola
Dawn Dongeun Wohn, violin
Stephen Dubetz, clarinet
Matthew Zalkind, cello
……
Laura Schwendinger, composer of Artemisia, winner of the 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Opera award ($50,000), one of the largest such award to composers of opera, was the first composer to win the Berlin Prize in 1999 and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.
A professor of music composition at UW–Madison, her works have been championed by Dawn Upshaw, Jennifer Koh, Janine Jansen, Matt Haimovitz, the Arditti, JACK and Spektral Quartets, International Contemporary Ensemble, Eighth-Blackbird, Juilliard, American Composers Orchestra, Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra of Hungary. Her music has been performed at the Kennedy & Lincoln Centers, Berlin Philharmonic, Wigmore & Carnegie Halls, Miller Theater, and the Théâtre Châtelet, Tanglewood, Aspen, Ojai, Talis, & Bennington Music Festivals. She has received further fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, First Prize of the 1995 ALEA III International Competition, as well as multiple fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Copland House, Fromm, Koussevitzky and Bogliasco Foundations, MacDowell and Yaddo.
Her music has been called “captivating, artful and moving”, “music of infinite beauty” in the New York Times, as well as “ the genuine article..onto the ’season’s best list “ in the Boston Globe. Recent premieres include her second opera, Cabaret of Shadows, (a Fromm Commission) produced by Musiqa at MATCH 2 in Houston, Nightingales for Eleanor Bartsch and Ariana Kim, a consortium commission from the Dubuque & UW Symphony Orchestras, and a harp concerto, Second Sight for Atlanta Symphony principal harpist Elisabeth Remy Johnson, commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the Emory University Orchestra program. A solo cello work, Fluorecenza, was commissioned as part of Matt Haimovitz’s Primavera Project. A San Francisco Classical Voice review of her opera read “Artemisia is sumptuous on every level” and Colin Clarke wrote of her JACK CD QUARTETS, “the sheer intensity of the music is spellbinding…the passion shines through like light.” Opera Magazine just called her third opera Margaret in Love and War “atmospheric” and “effecting.”
