BPO concert history: women composers
Since 1941, Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra has performed over 950 concerts, playing the music of nearly 300 composers. Yet over those eighty years of music-making, and including performances in 2024 of Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony and Louise Farrenc’s Overture № 1, just twenty-two concerts have featured music written by women, ten composers in total. Between 1955 and 2014, BPO did not play music written by women at all — a gap of well over half a century.
Of course, BPO should not be singled out in this respect: orchestras amateur and professional across the world similarly overlook music written by women. The most recent ‘Equality and Diversity in Global Repertoire’ report from the Donne Women in Music foundation investigated the 2021/22 season of 111 orchestras across 31 countries and found that 92.3% of the 20,400 scheduled compositions were written by men — and the 7.7% of pieces by women represented a marginal improvement on the previous year. The top ten composers (those whose pieces were most performed) were — unsurprisingly — European men. Together they accounted for 27.5% of all scheduled works, nearly four times more than all works by women combined.
There is no question of the popularity and cultural value and importance of music by Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Stravinsky, R Strauss, and Shostakovich. BPO’s core repertoire comprises the large orchestral works from the early 19th century to the present day, most of them written by men, and BPO will continue to explore and present these pieces. But this is not a zero-sum game: performing Beach, Price, Holmés, Smyth, Farrenc, Munktell, and others will not diminish the status of Wagner or Mahler. So while our 2024/25 season includes Holst, Walton, Elgar, Bruch, Brahms, Nielsen, and Copland, in June 2025 BPO will perform blue cathedral written in 1999 by American composer Jennifer Higdon as part of an American programme. Our aim is not mere tokenism but always the thoughtful curation of music, sometimes seldom heard, for BPO’s engaged and discerning audience.
Between 1942 and 1944, Teresa del Riego’s song ‘Homing’ was sung four times by soprano Minneth Shaw, including at the first of BPO’s popular series of ‘Music for All’ concerts. In March 1946 BPO performed an orchestration of the suite A Lover in Damascus by Amy Woodforde-Finden, and did so again twice more the following year; however, although the concerts were reviewed in the local press, Woodforde-Finden’s music was not mentioned.
As part of the city’s contribution to the Festival of Britain, September 1951 saw the premiere across four performances (with Barfield Grand Opera Society) of Margaret More’s opera The Mermaid (her first major work) at Moseley and Balsall Heath Institute. While More was credited as the composer, her married name — Mrs Raymond Bantock — was prominently noted in the programme and press reviews, as though marriage to Sir Granville Bantock’s second son was the passport she required to being taken seriously as a composer. The opera’s Prelude appeared in 1952, and a year later BPO played ‘Forward – A Marching Song for 1953’ by More at Town Hall in Birmingham. Featured twice in 1955 was an arrangement of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s Songs of the Hebrides.
Sixty years later, the BPO Concerto Prize competition saw the return of music by women: first in 2014 was Alexandra Pakhmutova’s trumpet concerto performed by Emily Walker; and in our seventy-fifth anniversary year of 2016, marimba soloist Yu-Cheng Chen achieved second place, playing Keiko Abe’s Prism Rhapsody. To commemorate the centenary of the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, the Imperial War Museum commissioned a new score by Laura Rossi; on 15 July 2017 at Walsall Town Hall, BPO accompanied the ninety-ninth screening (of one hundred) of the film. BPO’s concerts for Christmas 2019 featured music from the Disney film Frozen, co-written by Kristen Anderson Lopez. In 2024, BPO concerts included Beach’s Gaelic Symphony and Farrenc’s Overture № 1.
Credit: Owen Gregory (BPO oboe and cor anglais) https://fullcreammilk.co.uk/
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