Fire and Flood is a deliciously adventurous collection that Woolf refers to as a “composer portrait.”
By T’Cha Dunlevy March 25, 2021
Composer Luna Pearl Woolf in her home studio in Outremont. Her album Fire and Flood was nominated for a Grammy Award for best classical compendium. PHOTO BY JOHN MAHONEY /Montreal Gazette
Luna Pearl Woolf caught COVID-19 on March 10, 2020, at a charity concert and dinner during a two-day trip to New York. One year and four days later, the Montreal composer was a first-time nominee at the 63rd Grammy Awards, where her album Fire and Flood was up for best classical compendium.
MONTREAL – When Montreal opera composer Luna Pearl Woolf isn’t deep into her music work, she’s doing things like monitoring her heart rate just to keep her COVID-19 long-haul symptoms at bay.
And after a whirlwind of a year dealing with the virus, her album Fire and Flood was nominated for a Grammy, only making it harder for her to keep her heart from pumping too hard.
“That was just insane!” said Woolf.
“I was at one of my worst points in the long-haul COVID. I’d practically been in bed for a month at that point or maybe and I had been [thinking], ‘This can’t go on. I don’t know how I’m going to continue.’ Then I learned this album nominated for a Grammy. I had no idea that that was even going to be possible,” she said.
By: Cindy Sherwin CTV News Montreal Video Journalist
February 24, 2021
MONTREAL — Luna Pearl Woolf sank to her lowest point last November. The successful Montreal composer was emotionally and physically worn out from living with post-COVID symptoms for more than seven months.
Tired of feeling tired, she began questioning her future.
“I started thinking, ‘Well if this is my life, how do I want to live it, do I want to keep trying to be a composer where I have to travel all over the world and get up and lead rehearsals?’” she said.
The mother of two was forced to reckon with a heartbreaking dilemma that so many people with long-term COVID symptoms — so-called ‘long-haulers’ — are facing.
On the ‘COVID Long-Haulers Support Group Canada’ Facebook page, comments from sufferers about their inability to work and take care of their families are common:
“11 months of barely being able to function.”
“…My family physician just says rest but that’s hard when bills still need to be paid.”
“I’m a self-employed massage therapist and can’t work.”
Woolf said she was pondering some tough questions one day last fall.
“If I physically can’t do it, what would I do?” she asked herself.
“These Pulitzer-winning pieces are excursions in an essentially conservative style by established figures.” – The Sunday Times
Oregon Symphony and Carlos Kalmar continue their acclaimed Aspects of America series with this second instalment, featuring three symphonic works that were all awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Walter Piston’s Symphony No. 7 (Pulitzer Prize 1961) is a pastoral and jubilant glorification of nature, while Morton Gould’s Stringmusic (Pulitzer Prize 1995) was composed for star cellist Rostropovich, and showcases all possible sounds and colors of the string orchestra. In his Symphony No. 4 “Requiem” (Pulitzer Prize 1944), Howard Hanson explores the mysteries of life and death in an American musical idiom that simultaneously reveals the composer’s Nordic roots.
“A wonderful crosssection of Woolf’s vocal writing that bodes well for the new opera.” – The WholeNote
The composer-portrait album, released in January, encompasses 25 years of dramatic vocal and choral works and hauntingly re-imagined Leonard Cohen masterpieces by the innovative American-Canadian composer. LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Fire and Flood (PENTATONE Oxingale Series) features performances from The Choir of Trinity Wall Street and NOVUS NY, cellist Matt Haimovitz, soprano Devon Guthrie, mezzo-soprano Elise Quagliata, and Broadway actress Nancy Anderson.
Today, LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Fire and Flood has been nominated for a 2021 GRAMMY Award in the category of Best Classical Compendium. The composer-portrait album, released in February, encompasses 25 years of dramatic vocal and choral works and hauntingly re-imagined Leonard Cohen masterpieces by the innovative American-Canadian composer. LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Fire and Flood (PENTATONE Oxingale Series) features performances from The Choir of Trinity Wall Street and NOVUS NY, cellist Matt Haimovitz, soprano Devon Guthrie, mezzo-soprano Elise Quagliata, and Broadway actress Nancy Anderson.
This new Grammy nomination coincides with the 20th anniversary of the ground-breaking, Grammy Award-winning OXINGALE RECORDS. Launched in 2000 by cellist Matt Haimovitz and composer Luna Pearl Woolf, the label embraces both mind and heart, melding genres and boldly navigating between the worlds of classical, new music, Jazz, crossover and opera.
Releasing their first recording of the Bach cello suites in 2000, they boldly took the music of Bach into then-unimaginable venues for classical music, like punk palace CBGB, sparking what would become the alt-classical genre. Cutting-edge collaborators over two decades have included DJ Olive, David Sanford, John McLaughlin, Vijay Iyer, pianist Christopher O’Riley, the Miró Quartet, and conductor Dennis Russell Davies, among many others. January 2015 marked the debut of the PENTATONE Oxingale Series, a new partnership with the Amsterdam-based label, renowned for its discerning artistic quality and superior audiophile technology.
LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Fire and Flood, a Pentatone Oxingale Series recording, has been nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Compendium. The composer-portrait album, released in February, encompasses 25 years of dramatic vocal and choral works and hauntingly re-imagined Leonard Cohen masterpieces by the innovative American-Canadian composer. Luna Pearl Woolf: Fire and Flood features performances from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and Novus NY, cellist Matt Haimovitz, soprano Devon Guthrie, mezzo-soprano Elise Quagliata and Broadway actress Nancy Anderson.
Noted among a new generation of politically conscious and artistically progressive composers, Luna Pearl Woolf’s music is praised by The New York Times for its “psychological nuances and emotional depth.” Opera Going Toronto called her recent Dora Award-winning opera, Jacqueline, “brilliant, wrenching… profoundly moving.” (Read more about Luna Pearl Woolf here.)
Of the album, The New York Times contributing writer Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim writes, “Luna Pearl Woolf trains a zoom lens on the collective experience, plunging us right into the midst of destruction and anarchy only to pull back, in one swoop, to a clear-eyed plane of compassion.”
The album includes the dramatic To the Fire, with text from the Book of Ezekiel; Missa in Fines Orbis Terrae, composed for the choir and organ of St. James Cathedral, Toronto; and the inventive One to One to One, inspired by the towering redwood sculptures at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Also featured is Après moi, le deluge, concerto for cello and a cappella choir written in the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One of Woolf’s most frequently-performed works – including in New Orleans and at Carnegie Hall in New York – it was described as “by turns blazingly ardent and softly haunting” by The New York Times. (Watch the video for Apres moi, le déluge here.)
Finally, Woolf reconfigures Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows and Who By Fire in haunting new arrangements. Combining the three women’s voices and Haimovitz’s cello, Woolf captures Cohen’s deep-voiced essence in a kaleidoscopic expansion of the original songs’ colors and timbres. (Watch the video for Cohen’s Everybody Knowshere.)
This new Grammy nomination coincides with the 20th anniversary of the ground-breaking, Grammy Award-winning Oxingale Records. Launched in 2000 by cellist Matt Haimovitz and composer Luna Pearl Woolf, the label embraces both mind and heart, melding genres and navigating between the worlds of classical, new music, jazz, crossover and opera. Releasing their first recording of the Bach Cello Suites in 2000, they took the music of Bach into then-unimaginable venues for classical music, like punk palace CBGB, sparking what would become the alt-classical genre. Cutting-edge collaborators over two decades have included DJ Olive, David Sanford, John McLaughlin, Vijay Iyer, pianist Christopher O’Riley, the Miró Quartet, and conductor Dennis Russell Davies, among many others. January 2015 marked the debut of the Pentatone Oxingale Series, a new partnership with the Amsterdam-based label, which is renowned for its artistic quality and audiophile technology.
Luna Pearl Woolf 