Miller Theatre Composer Portrait: Lisa Bielawa
Composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is featured on a Composer Portrait Concert at Miller Theatre at Columbia University, with performances of her music by Contemporaneous conducted by Co-Artistic Director David Bloom, and sung by Bielawa herself. The program includes the world premiere of Balloon Variations, commissioned by Miller Theatre for the occasion, as well as two of Bielawa’s earlier works – Incessabili Voce from 2013 and Graffiti dell’amante from 2010.
Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock.” Her music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times, and “fluid and arresting ... at once dramatic and probing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is established as one of today’s leading composers and performers, consistently incorporating community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; she has composed and produced a twelve-episode, made-for-TV opera that features over 350 musicians and was filmed in locations across the country.
In addition to her Composer Portrait at Miller Theatre, Lisa Bielawa’s 2025-2026 season features bold programming, new collaborations, and world premieres of several new works. Knoxville Broadcast, a new installment in Bielawa’s Broadcast series, was premiered on October 17 and 18, 2025 in Knoxville, TN in three site-specific performances at Knoxville’s World’s Fair Park presented by Big Ears. Violinist Tessa Lark has given the first two premiere performances of Bielawa’s Violin Concerto No. 2, PULSE with two of the co-commissioning orchestras – the world premiere performances with the Louisville Orchestra, conducted by Teddy Abrams on October 24 and 25, 2025; and the Cincinnati premiere with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Music Director Cristian Mӑcelaru, on November 29 and 30, 2025. She will perform it with another co-commissioner, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on April 19, 2026. Bielawa also serves as Howard Hanson Visiting Professor at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY for 2025-2026, where she will work with students who will be performing her music throughout the academic year. Eastman will present her next large-scale Broadcast in April 2026.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3456416-0
