BBC celebrates International Women’s Day with Neuwirth, Gubaidulina and Smyth
International Women’s Day on Saturday 8 March brings concerts and broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 featuring music by Olga Neuwirth, Sofia Gubadulina and Ethyl Smyth.
BBC Radio 3’s schedule on International Women’s Day, Saturday 8 March, includes a live evening broadcast from Bridgewater Hall in Manchester featuring the UK premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s Dreydl together with Sofia Gubaidulina’s The Light of the End, performed by the BBC Philharmonic under its Principal Guest Conductor Anja Bihlmaier. Opera on 3 is devoted to Ethel Smyth’s one act opera Der Wald (The Forest) with a cast including Natalia Romaniw and Robert Murray, the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Andrews. Beyond the broadcasts on Radio 3 on 8 March, the performances can be heard internationally on BBC Sounds.
Olga Neuwirth’s 11-minute orchestral work Dreydl, receiving its UK premiere in Manchester on 8 March, was composed in 2021 and is one of her most travelled scores of recent years, with performances to date in France, Sweden, Germany, Spain, the USA and Canada. The composer describes how “Dreydl is a one-movement orchestral piece that emerged out of my preoccupation with memory and the passing of time … The title was inspired by the first line of the Yiddish children's song ‘Ikh bin a kleyner dreydl’. A dreydl is a spinning top that children still play with today during the Festival of Lights, Chanukah. As with dice, the dreydl is a game of chance. Incessantly it spins and spins and is therefore for me a symbol of life...”
Sofia Gubaidulina’s The Light of the End was composed in 2003, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Kurt Masur and recorded by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelsons on Deutsche Grammophon. The composer describes how the 25-minute orchestral score takes its name “from the bright sound of the antique cymbals that bring the coda of this piece to a close. But despite the reflective title, the overall sense of the composition is dramatic. The drama is caused by the conflict between the intrinsic character of instruments to produce the sounds of the natural overtone row and the necessity of adapting them to the sounds of 12-tone tempered tuning… The piece concludes with the removal of a dissonance in which the contrasts are resolved.”
> More information on the Manchester concert
Ethel Smyth’s one act opera Der Wald (The Forest) was premiered in 1902 in Berlin, with further stagings at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, marking a high point in the composer’s career. The BBC’s Opera on 3 series broadcasts the first recording of the opera, released on Resonus Classics in 2023. As conductor John Andrews noted in a Gramophone interview, “like Humperdinck, Smyth starts with music that’s very tonal and in a recognisable folk idiom; there are dances, and even the initial forest music is in a luscious, Romantic style. But then the further you go into the forest, the darker it gets, the more expressionistic it becomes – the stranger the harmonies, the more angular the rhythms, the more experimental the orchestration.”
> More information on the Ethel Smyth recording
Alongside these works by Neuwirth, Gubaidulina and Smyth, you can explore other music by women composers published by Boosey & Hawkes and Sikorski on our website.
> Further information on Work: Dreydl
Photos: Rui Camilo, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, Wikimedia Commons