“You can't be born in San Francisco and not face life without a certain optimism and sense of beauty, I think,” Leon Fleisher told the Johns Hopkins Gazette in 2015. “It's filled with hope, with promise, with potential.” Fleisher, who passed away in August 2020 at 92, spent the remainder of his amazing life expanding the definitions of optimism and beauty with his performances as both pianist and conductor, and raising the levels of hope, promise, and potential in the students with whom he worked as a teacher. At Peabody, he imparted his singular insight into music and the piano to generations of emerging artists, starting in 1959 and continuing up until the week before he passed. And in 2012, Fleisher donated his papers to the Peabody Archives of the Arthur Friedheim Library; the collection includes a legendary career’s worth of concert programs, publicity material and press clippings, correspondence, photographs, personal papers, scrapbooks, and memorabilia.

On November 7 at 2:00 pm EST, the Peabody Institute honors Maestro Fleisher with a livestreamed Leon Fleisher Memorial Service, which features music recorded by Fleisher and comments from his widow Katherine Jacobson Fleisher, his children, Dean Fred Bronstein, and other friends and professional associates. The Leon Fleisher Scholarship Fund will continue providing funding for the education of pianists in honor of the musical wisdom with which Fleisher graced Peabody for 61 years. Donations can be made at secure.jhu.edu/form/leonfleisher.

Whenever I have the opportunity, I enjoy telling people that Peabody’s composition program is by anyone’s measure among the very best of its kind today, nationally and internationally. Boasting two Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, Guggenheim winners, and claiming virtually every compositional honor possible, the faculty at Peabody today is second to none. But this strength in composition at Peabody didn’t just happen. We celebrate the 150th anniversary of Peabody composition during this 2021-22 academic year with a history that is chock full of important and indeed ground-breaking compositional figures. Figures such as Henry Cowell, Nadia Boulanger, Earle Brown, and Nicholas Maw to name only a few are the history on which today’s great strengths are built. Those strengths have also encompassed the world of computer music, where Peabody established one of the first programs of its kind, which has just celebrated 50 years. Peabody continues to innovate in this space right up to and including the launch of Peabody’s Music for New Media program led by Thomas Dolby, which graduates its first cohort this year, and where students today are working truly at the frontier of music and technology.

As part of the 150th anniversary, just last week the Peabody Symphony Orchestra performed the works of five outstanding student composers—the program now boasts more than 50 majors—in performances conducted by Peabody students from the graduate conducting program led by Marin Alsop. This is one of the most unique things about Peabody’s composition and conducting programs. In addition to the obvious strengths of the faculty, the chance for students to garner serious and high-level performances of their work here at Peabody is so valuable, in much the same way that conductors get podium time in front of an orchestra. To me, this concert not only showed off what is wonderful about Peabody’s composition and conducting programs, but speaks to the school’s unique ability to innovate in the context of deep and long-standing musical traditions that Peabody has always represented.

I know you’ll join me in celebrating the great history of composition at Peabody, and the knowledge that the next 150 years will have a lot to live up to!

Fred Bronstein, Dean

Earlier this year soprano Noelle McMurtry (GPD ’18, Voice), a DMA voice candidate, was awarded the Presser Foundation’s Graduate Music Award to support a research project that’s part of McMurtry’s ongoing work to challenge the gendered narratives that surround canon creation. As Director of Live Programming for the New York-based Pleiades Project, she presents a staged reading of the original musical A Women’s Suffrage Splendiferous Extravaganza! celebrating the 19th Amendment’s centennial. Co-created by McMurtry with November Christine and Caroline Miller, Splendiferous takes place at the Lab at Alchemical Studios in Manhattan and can be livestreamed for one month beginning November 6. Tickets can be purchased online.

Joy Guidry (BM ’18, Bassoon) performs five original works and three new commissions by composers Jessie Cox, Lisa E. Harris, and Olivia Shortt at the Kitchen in New York. The concert features Guidry on bassoon, theremin, voice, electronics, and video and Cox on drums. Tickets can be purchased online.

Poppaea, a new one-act opera by composition professor Michael Hersch (BM ’95, MM ’97, Composition), had its world premiere at Festival ZeitRäume Basel on September 10—watch the trailer—featuring associate professor of voice Ah Young Hong (BM ’98, MM ’01, Voice). This 21st-century imagining of the life of Roman Emperor Nero’s second wife, with a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann, receives its Austrian premiere November 5 through 7 at the Wien Modern Festival in Vienna. Tickets are available online.

Duo Ingolfsson-Stoupel, the violin and piano group that includes violin professor Judith Ingolfsson, performs its "From Europe to America" program—Karol Rathaus’ Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano, Op. 14, César Franck’s Sonata in A Major, and Camille Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28—as part of the Eclectic Series on Bargemusic, the floating barge at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Tickets are available online.

Gemma New (MM ’11, Conducting), who earlier this year received The Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, returns to Baltimore’s Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall to lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra through Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides Overture, Debussy’s La mer, and Peabody composer Kevin Puts’ The Brightness of Light with soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Rod Gilfry. Tickets are available online.

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Peabody Notes highlights select off-campus performances featuring Peabody performers. For other events, please visit our Peabody Conservatory Facebook page.