Composer Gabriella Smith.
“In 2014, the composer Gabriella Smith took a hike through the Lost Coast in Northern California,” writes Joshua Barone in Thursday’s (5/25) New York Times. “ ‘I felt so much awe being there,’ Smith said. And she liked the sound of the name: the poetry of the words ‘lost’ and ‘coast’ together, the multiple meanings it suggests. It was, as [composer] John Adams, one of her mentors, would say, a title in search of a piece. She wrote a cello solo with looping electronics for Gabriel Cabezas, a friend and former classmate at the Curtis Institute of Music, inspired by the image of a trail being repeatedly washed away. Then the piece transformed into a more complex, layered recording, released in 2021. And now ‘Lost Coast’ is taking on yet another life, its grandest yet: a cello concerto, premiering on Thursday with Cabezas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic…. She prefers to write for people she has a relationship with, even as she receives increasingly prominent commissions…. Her music, in addition to its fascination with the natural world, exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy.” Read Symphony magazine’s profile of Smith and other composers with environmental concerns.
