women of notes

Doreen Carwithen Bishop Rock
Dorothy Howell Lamia
Florence Price Piano Concerto
Bartók Concerto for Orchestra

28 February 2026 7.30pm


Clare Hammond piano
Philip Ellis conductor

A trio of long-neglected female composers make up the first half of this concert. From Buckinghamshire, Birmingham and Arkansas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their music has been unfairly overlooked, victim to an undoubted gender bias and misogyny as well as, later, the fashion for modernism, it is now enjoying something of a revival.

Lamia, based on the Keats poem of the snake transformed into a woman, was particularly successful when composed by a very young Howell (“the English Strauss”) and was so popular it was played at six subsequent seasons of the Proms but then, after 1940, not again until 2010; Florence Price was the first black woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra; Carwithen, as well as writing for the concert stage, was the first woman anywhere in the world to work full-time as a film composer.

And we conclude, in the second half, with one of Bartók’s most popular, and accessible works - an orchestral tour de force.