Katherine Needleman – Past Concerts

Katherine Needleman joined the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as principal oboist in 2003, the same year she won first prize at the International Double Reed Society's Gillet-Fox Competition.

A lifelong improviser, she has recorded the Marmalade Balloon, an album of improvised, ambient chamber music with distinguished classical music colleagues as well as synthesizers from the 1960s and 1970s. She started writing music down on paper during the COVID-19 pandemic and won the International Double Reed Society's Inaugural Commissioning Competition with her sonata for oboe and piano. They commissioned her to write a work for English horn and piano which received its premiere in July, 2021, with Alison Teale of the BBC Symphony.

A Baltimore native, Ms. Needleman attended high school at the Baltimore School for the Arts but left early to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She served on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University for fifteen years and is currently on faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music.