Luna Pearl Woolf

For a list of Luna’s music, click here or choose her name from the categories at right.

Called “blazingly ardent and softly haunting “ by the New York Times, the music of composer/producer Luna Pearl Woolf offers penetrating insight into its subjects, creating acoustic sound worlds that evoke and inspire. Woolf’s music draws listeners into an emotional journey. Her innovative collaborations with authors, filmmakers, dancers and musicians tell original stories or grapple with history and current events.

Academy Award winning actor Jeremy Irons narrates Woolf’s AngelHeart, a setting of a new story by bestselling children’s author Cornelia Funke. In fall 2013 AngelHeart will be released in both an audio format and as an interactive environment for iPad and Android. The app, conceived by Woolf and created in collaboration with Mathew Cullen’s Mirada in Los Angeles, takes a new, music-centered approach to tablet-based storytelling. The full AngelHeart project is performed by singers Frederica von Stade, Sanford Sylvan, Daniel Taylor, Zheng Cao and Delan, cellist Matt Haimovitz and Uccello, with guest appearances by mandolinists Mike Marshall and Caterina Lichtenberg.

Other recent projects include Suspense, music for the 1913 ground-breaking short silent film by Lois Weber, scored for 8 cellos and 4 percussionists, to be premiered by Uccello and the McGill Percussion Ensemble on April 3, 2013 in Montreal. Soprano Lisa Delan has commissioned two works for soprano, cello and piano, the most recent, Rumi: Quatrains of Love, will be released on PentaTone Classics in spring 2013.

Woolf’s Carnegie Hall debut in 2012 was her Après Moi, le Déluge, for solo cello and a cappella choir (2005) performed by Matt Haimovitz and the Trinity Wall Street Choir, Julian Wachner conducting. As “The first major work of classical music to commemorate the flooding of New Orleans” (Arts Journal), the work was described by the New York Times as: “an unsentimental but moving tribute” and “Somber, sardonic and bluesy.” Strings Magazine has called the work, “sorrowful, deeply political, and aching with universal regret.”

Woolf’s music has also been featured on NPR’s From the Top, the BBC’s The World and on NPR’s All Things Considered as well as Opera News, Strings Magazine, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Sequenza21. A full album of her music, including the “operatorio” Orpheus on Sappho’s Shore, and Après Moi, le Déluge, was recently released on Oxingale Records.

Woolf has been commissioned and performed by singers Frederica von Stade, Sanford Sylvan, Daniel Taylor and Lisa Delan, pianist Christopher O’Riley, Trinity Wall Street Choir, the Russian National Orchestra, the Minnesota Sinfonia, the New Amsterdam Singers, and ECM+, among others.

A prolific and imaginative producer, Woolf has been instrumental in spearheading Oxingale Productions, Inc. with cellist and co-founder Matt Haimovitz. As producer of thirteen recordings on Oxingale Records, Woolf has worked closely with performers such as Haimovitz and pianist Christopher O’Riley, the Miro quartet and others to release critically acclaimed albums that have been nominated for GRAMMY, JUNO and INDIE awards and frequently appear in the press’s top ten lists, including Amazon’s Best Classical Instrumental Album of the year in 2003.

In 2010 She launched Oxingale Music, publishing the works of award-winning contemporary composers such as Lewis Spratlan and David Sanford, and including a range of pieces recorded on Oxingale Records.

Woolf graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, having also studied at Oberlin Conservatory, and earned her MA from Smith College. Woolf’s principal composition teachers have included Mario Davidovsky, Augusta Read Thomas, and Lewis Spratlan.