“Composer Julia Adolphe is not yet 30. But already, she has written three works for the New York Philharmonic and a piece for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra,” writes Janelle Gelfand in Friday’s (12/1) Musical America (subscription required). “The New York native, who is earning a doctorate at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, is currently at work on her second opera.” Her concerto for New York Philharmonic Principal Viola Cynthia Phelps, Unearth, Release, premiered in 2016; Shiver and Bloom premiered at LACO in May 2017. “James Conlon, May Festival music director laureate … commissioned her evocative Sea Dream Elegies for chorus oboe/English horn, and cello … in 2016…. At Cornell University, she studied with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky … his only undergraduate composition student in a class of all-male doctoral students…. The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation … has [provided] funds for two of her key awards: the League of American Orchestras’ Women Composers Readings and Commissions program, for the viola concerto, and Opera America’s Grants for Female Composers for her new opera…. Adolphe believes that the most important thing a composer can do is to ‘stay true to your own voice.’ ”
Posted December 4, 2017
