Four Composers Selected for 2025 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute and Future Classics Concert

Elise Arancio, Andrew Faulkenberry, Soomin Kim and Benjamin Webster are the featured emerging composers for the April 25 Future Classics concert, conducted by Music Director Thomas Søndergård

As part of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, composers will participate in mentoring sessions, under the direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts

Four of the nation’s top emerging orchestral composers have been selected to participate in the Minnesota Orchestra’s 2025 Composer Institute, which culminates in a Future Classics concert featuring their music, conducted by Music Director Thomas Søndergård and hosted by composer Kevin Puts, on Friday, April 25, 2025, 8 p.m., at Orchestra Hall. The selected composers are Elise Arancio, Andrew Faulkenberry, Soomin Kim and Benjamin Webster.

“These composers have such unique, disparate voices, and they write with great imagination and color. I look forward to working with them as they hear their creations played so masterfully by the Orchestra. This incarnation of the program will be somewhat different from previous years in that I will be interviewing each composer from the stage myself, pointing out certain things for the audience to listen for, with musical examples played by the Orchestra. I hope this will give our audiences more insight into the creative decisions that these young composers make,” said Kevin Puts, the Pulitzer-Prize winning composer who directs the Composer Institute and will serve as mentor to the participants. “It’s wonderful to have this program embraced by Thomas Søndergård and sustained by the Orchestra to support a new generation of composers.” 

The 2025 Composer Institute has been recast to spotlight four composers (instead of up to seven in past years) to allow more time and focus in preparing and presenting their work. The Future Classics concert marks the first led by Thomas Søndergård, who began his tenure as music director last season. The 2025 program also includes a new partnership with Universal Music Publishing Classics & Screen and Ricordi New York as part of the launch of their RicordiLab US Program, designed to support the careers of young composers. Ricordi will assist with preparing scores and instrumental parts and offer mentoring support to the composers. 

As part of their Composer Institute experience, Arancio, Faulkenberry, Kim and Webster will participate in a multi-day immersion into the artistic life of an orchestra, attending work sessions with Søndergård and Puts, meeting with Orchestra music library staff and Ricordi/Universal Music Publishing professionals, honing their skills in public presentation, filming with the Orchestra’s digital team, and learning more about orchestral programming cycles from artistic staff. The week will culminate in a Future Classics concert featuring their music, which will offer each composer the onstage spotlight to introduce themselves and their composition to audiences. Each work will be filmed, and the performance subsequently released by the Orchestra on its YouTube channel for free access. 

The roots of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute date to 2002, with more than 140 composers participating in the pioneering program over the decades, including such alumni as Grammy Award nominees Anna Clyne, Missy Mazzoli and Zhou Tian, and Pulitzer Prize nominees Andrew Norman, Ted Hearne and Michael Gilbertson. Under Søndergård’s leadership, the program is now offered on a biennial basis in rotation with the Orchestra’s Listening Project, an initiative to program and record the music of historically underrepresented composers.   

The 2025 participants were identified through a competitive process that opened with a call for nominations with selection determined by Puts, the Minnesota Orchestra Artistic Advisory Committee and Ricordi/Universal Music Publishing representatives.

About the Composers

Elise Arancio, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, is pursuing her master’s at the Juilliard School of Music. With her music often drawing inspiration from poetry and literature, Arancio received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Scholarship in 2024 and has had her music performed by the symphony orchestras of Atlanta and New Jersey. Her composition Bite Your Tongue depicts an individual being silenced by both internal and external forces. 

A native of Spotswood, New Jersey, Andrew Faulkenberry received his master’s from the Peabody Conservatory in 2023. His music has been performed by the Albany Symphony, International Contemporary Ensemble and Parker Quartet, and praised by composer William Bolcom as having “mature tone. . . and considerable spiritual depth.” The Minnesota Orchestra will perform his portrait through a prism, a work inspired by the kaleidoscopic refraction of light through a prism.  

Soomin Kim recently served as a Sounding Ground composer in residence with Zeitgeist, and her music has been performed at festivals ranging from Ravinia and Liquid Music to Aspen. Originally from South Korea, Kim is a visiting assistant professor of composition at her alma mater, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Her work star / ghost / mouth / sea is a set of four miniatures for orchestra that explore metaphors found in poet Franny Choi’s Soft Science. 

Born in Wrentham, Massachusetts, Benjamin Webster is currently a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Music, whose music explores the beauty and fragility of sound and gesture. His works have been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Lyris Quartet and Yale Philharmonia, as well as heard at the Oregon Bach Festival. His Autumn Movement explores questions around the concept of personal, natural and societal changes. 

About Kevin Puts

A Grammy and Pulitzer Prize winner, Kevin Puts is one of America’s leading composers, receiving commissions and performances from the Metropolitan Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra and Carnegie Hall, and collaborating with artists such as Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Yannick Nezet-Seguin and Marin Alsop. His opera The Hours was such a triumph when it premiered at the Met in 2022 that the company revived it in the next season. His breakthrough opera Silent Night—for which he won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize—was premiered in 2011 by the Minnesota Opera. A member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute, Puts is serving as distinguished visiting composer at the Juilliard School in the current academic year. His collaboration with the Minnesota Orchestra on the Composer Institute began in 2015. For the first time, this year’s Future Classics concert will include a work by Puts, Heartland.  

Minnesota Orchestra Classical Concert
SØNDERGÅRD CONDUCTS FUTURE CLASSICS 

Friday, April 25, 2025, 8 p.m. / Orchestra Hall

Minnesota Orchestra
Thomas Søndergård, conductor
Kevin Puts, concert host and Composer Institute director 

PUTS                            Heartland 
WEBSTER                    Autumn Movement
ARANCIO                     Bite Your Tongue for Orchestra and Tape
KIM                              star / ghost / mouth / sea
FAULKENBERRY          portrait through a prism         

Tickets: $29 with Choose Your Price tickets available [Free tickets are also available for listeners ages 6 to 18, thanks to Hall Pass]

TICKET PURCHASING INFORMATION
     
Tickets can be purchased at minnesotaorchestra.org or by calling 612-371-5656. For groups of 10 or more, call 612-371-5662.
     
The 2024-2025 Classical Season is presented by Ameriprise Financial.
     
The Hall Pass program makes free tickets available for young listeners ages 6 to 18 for select Classical and Symphony in 60 concerts, and all kids under 18 for Family concerts. This program is sponsored by Cynthia and Jay Ihlenfeld. Click here for more information.
     
These activities are made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

All programs, artists, dates, times and prices subject to change.

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