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Stories   >   Luna Pearl Woolf's 'Vagues et ombres' makes La Scena Musicale: New Releases for summer

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Luna Pearl Woolf's 'Vagues et ombres' makes La Scena Musicale: New Releases for summer

Posted: May 26, 2023

Canadian-American composer Luna Pearl Woolf has long used her creative voice to advocate for social and political change. ?Particularly renowned in the field of opera, her music, praised by The New York Times for its “psychological nuances and emotional depth,” is characterized by its dramatic intention, with a penetrating focus on music’s capacity as a storytelling language.

The 2021 GRAMMY-nominated? ?composer-portrait? a?lbum?, LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Fire and Flood?, spans several decades of the composer’s work and grapples with such pressing issues as climate change, poverty, zealotry, racism, gender roles and plague, through music that is as is intensely emotional as it is lyrical and complex. The album, released on the PENTATONE Oxingale Series, features The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, NOVUS NY and conductor Julian Wachner, with soloists cellist Matt Haimovitz, soprano Devon Guthrie, mezzo-soprano Elise Quagliata, and Broadway actor Nancy Anderson.

Tapestry Opera premiered Woolf’s ?Jacqueline?, about legendary cellist Jacqueline du Pre´, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, in February 2020. The production garnered five nominations and a win in Toronto’s prestigious Dora Awards. ?Better Gods?, about Hawaii’s Queen Lili‘uokalani, was premiered by Washington National Opera. The Pillar? was awarded one of Opera America’s inaugural Discovery Grants for female composers. Current projects include ?The Limit of the Sun? with librettist Andrea Stolowitz and ?City On Fire? with librettist David Van Taylor.

Among Woolf’s most widely-performed works are ?Apre`s moi, le de´luge?, written in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and ?Angel Heart,? narrated by Jeremy Irons, recently released worldwide, alongside a new German-language edition with author Cornelia Funke narrating. Other noted collaborators include Dame Evelyn Glennie, Joyce DiDonato, the Brentano String Quartet, Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchestra, among many others.

Woolf founded the ground-breaking Oxingale Records with Haimovitz in 2000, and Oxingale Music in 2010. Her music can be heard internationally on the PENTATONE Oxingale Series.


La Scena Musicale writes……Immerse yourself in a world of colours and textures with the music of Claude Debussy and Luna Pearl Woolf in Vagues et ombres (Waves and Shadows). The album includes original arrangements of a set of piano works by Debussy as well as his iconic symphonic work, La mer. A sonic evocation of the underwater world of belugas in the St. Lawrence River estuary, Woolf’s Contact addresses an urgent situation affecting the marine ecosystem in Quebec.

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