Bio
Award-winning composer Luna Pearl Woolf has long used her evocative 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” (NY Times). Her dramatic works are championed by major opera
houses and international performing artists.
Woolf’s oratorio Number Our Days, with concept and libretto by David Van Taylor,
was commissioned and premiered by PAC NYC in its inaugural 2023-2024 season,
receiving a thunderous response: “extraordinary, completely original...new and
electrifying,” “death-affirming, life-inciting,” “elegiac, funny, haunting...poetic, and
utterly unique.”
Canada’s CBC Music named the JUNO award-nominated recording Vagues et
Ombres including Woolf’s 2022 work, Contact, as their #1 Classical Album of the year;
and her 2021 composer-portrait album, LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Fire and Flood
(Pentatone Oxingale Series) was nominated for a GRAMMY Award.
Woolf’s opera Jacqueline, about legendary cellist Jacqueline du Pré, with a libretto by
Royce Vavrek, commissioned and premiered by Tapestry Opera, was hailed as an
“extraordinary piece, one that deserves an unquestioned place in the 21st-century
canon” (The Globe and Mail). Its 2020 premiere garnered five nominations and a win
in Toronto’s prestigious Dora Awards.
Woolf mentors new opera creators in her work with Montreal’s Musique 3 Femmes,
and teaches about the intersection of text and music at institutions such as the
National Theater School of Canada and McGill University. She is co-founder of
Oxingale Productions, a ground-breaking record label and music publisher
supporting new music by lyrical and innovative contemporary composers.
A dual Canadian-American citizen, Woolf was born Western Massachusetts and lives
in Montréal, Quebec.