Sarah Brailey, Mindy Kaufman, Joshua Gordon, Christopher Taylor, Dawn Dongeun Wohn, Besnik Abrashi, Sage Eckard-Lee, Anthony Di Sanza, Trevor Maliborski

Mead Witter School of Music Faculty Artist Series. $20.

media release: 

Laura Schwendinger, composer

Sarah Brailey, soprano

Mindy Kaufman, flute

Joshua Gordon, cello

Christopher Taylor, piano

Dawn Dongeun Wohn, violin

Besnik Abrashi, clarinet

Sage Eckard-Lee, viola

Anthony Di Sanza and Trevor Maliborski, percussion

Oriol Sans, conductor

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 awards 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, and 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, and 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.

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.