2025 Program Guide | Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music

22 CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC 2025 FEATURED COMPOSERS Aleksandra Vrebalov , the 2024 Grawemeyer Music Award recipient, has composed more than a hundred works ranging from concert music to opera, dance, and experimental and documentary film scores. Her work is characterized by a fusion of influences from various musical traditions of the countries where she has lived or traveled, including Serbia, the United States, and the Middle East. Her works have been commissioned by prestigious institutions such as Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra (2024/25), the English National Ballet, the Cincinnati and Glimmerglass Opera, the Serbian National Theater, the Belgrade Philharmonic, The Forbidden City Orchestra in Beijing, and the Jose Limon and Rambert Dance Companies. She has extensively collaborated with the Kronos Quartet, for whom she has written 19 works. Vrebalov has written music for Western instruments, as well as ethnic and historical instruments from the Balkans, Asia, and Poland. A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Rockefeller Bellagio Center, Djerassi, American Opera Projects, The Hermitage, and Tanglewood, Vrebalov has received The Harvard Fromm Commission, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship, the Barlow Endowment Commission, and a MAP Fund grant. In Serbia, her country of origin, she has been honored with the Golden Badge of the Cultural and Educational Association of Serbia/Ministry of Foreign Affairs for her long-term contribution to Serbian culture (2015). She is a two-time winner of the Mokranjac Award—in 2009 for Stations and in 2011 for the opera Mileva . She has also won the “Muzika Klasika” award for Composer of the Year twice, for her opera Mileva (2011) and “Antennae” (2021), the latter commissioned by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Vrebalov has engaged in humanitarian work, making music with young refugees from Syria and Iraq at the Flying Carpet Festival on the Turkish/Syrian border in 2018 and 2019, curated by composer Sahba Aminikia. There are more than twenty CD releases featuring Vrebalov’s work, recorded for labels such as Nonesuch, Cantaloupe, Innova, Orange Mountain Music, New Amsterdam, Centaur Records, and Vienna Modern Masters. Her self-published works are distributed by Composers Edition in London, UK. Julia Wolfe’s recent premieres include  Pretty , premiered in June 2023 by conductor Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic. Co-commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, Houston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Pretty is a raucous celebration—embracing the grit of fiddling, the relentlessness of work rhythms, and inspired by the distortion and reverberation of rock and roll. unEarth , commissioned and premiered in June 2023 by the New York Philharmonic, is a large-scale work for orchestra, men’s chorus, and children’s chorus that addresses the climate crisis. Performed in three movements, the 40-minute piece is realized with spatial staging and scenic design projected on a large circular screen. Her Story , a 45-minute semi-staged work for orchestra and women’s chamber choir, received its world premiere in September 2022 with the Nashville Symphony, conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, the vocal ensemble Lorelei, and stage direction by Anne Kauffman. ALEKSANDRA VREBALOV JULIA WOLFE Co-commissioned by the Nashville Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and National Symphony Orchestra, Her Story invokes the words of historical figures and the spirit of pivotal moments to pay tribute to the centuries of ongoing struggle for equal rights and representation for women in America. In addition to receiving the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Wolfe was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. She received the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in Music, and was named Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year. Julia Wolfe is co-founder/co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can, and she is Artistic Director of NYU Steinhardt Music Composition. Her music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group. SPONSORED BY PHYLLIS ROSENBLUM & PETER PORISS, AND CHERRILL SPENCER ☆