Bio
Composer, producer and dramaturg Luna Pearl Woolf has long used her creative voice to advocate for social and political change. Her work has been praised as “brilliant... profoundly moving” (Opera Going Toronto) for its “psychological nuances and emotional depth” (The New York Times). The 2021 GRAMMY-nominated composer-portrait album, LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Fire and Flood, spans several decades of the composer’s work and grapples with such pressing issues as climate change, poverty, zealotry, racism, gender roles and plague, through music that is as is intensely emotional as it is lyrical and complex. The album, released on the PENTATONE Oxingale Series, features The Choir of Trinity Wall Street and NOVUS NY.
Woolf’s Jacqueline, about legendary cellist Jacqueline du Pré, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, was premiered by Tapestry Opera in February 2020. The production garnered five nominations and a win in Toronto’s prestigious Dora Awards, and was called an “extraordinary piece, one that deserves an unquestioned place in the 21st-century canon” (The Globe and Mail). Better Gods, about Hawaii’s Queen Lili‘uokalani, was premiered by Washington National Opera. The Pillar, with librettist David Van Taylor was awarded one of Opera America’s inaugural Discovery Grants for female composers. Current projects include The Limit of the Sun with librettist Andrea Stolowitz, and a new work with director Johanna Freundlich. CBC Music recently highlighted Woolf’s Contact, commissioned by Montreal string ensemble Collectif9 for their 2022 album Vagues et Ombres (Alpha Classics), naming the JUNO award-nominated recording CBC’s #1 Classical Album of the year. Other acclaimed works by Woolf include Angel Heart, for narrator and cello ensemble, narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons and featuring Frederica von Stade, released on the PENTATONE label alongside a new Germanlanguage edition with author Cornelia Funke narrating. Her Après moi, le déluge, a concerto for cello and choir written in 2006 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, has been performed more than a dozen times in eight cities across the US and Canada, including New Orleans and at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Other noted collaborators include Dame Evelyn Glennie, Joyce DiDonato, cellist Matt Haimovitz, the Brentano String Quartet, Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchestra, among many others.
Woolf is President and co-founder of the ground-breaking Oxingale Records, and founder of publisher Oxingale Music. An accomplished recording producer, she has produced albums for the Analekta, Atma, and Leaf labels, as well as for Oxingale. As a dramaturg and teacher, she shepherds new opera projects and lectures on the intersection of music and text at McGill University and the National Theater School of Canada, among others.