Baker Artist Portfolios

Katherine Needleman avoids sharing press quotes, finding them rather grotesque, and hopes her listeners will form their own opinions without prejudice. (She has some really good press but also a review that said she sounded like a backing up U-Haul and that unfortunate moment when the NYTimes found it appropriate to refer to her as a "small, intense woman" in 2012.) Trained in the most formal and venerated environments, she is now branching out and exploring all possibilities in her middle age. Beyond being a world-class oboist, Needleman is a composer, improviser, pianist, concert organizer, and advocate for women's equality.

A Baltimore native, Mx. Needleman taught herself to play the piano and read music when she was seven years old. She attended a year and a half of high school at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Her parents thought music was a career choice just above prostitution and that she was pre-destined to become a Jewish doctor. On one of the many days she cut high school, she took a train to Philadelphia and got into the fanciest (and all-scholarship) music school in the world playing the oboe. She arrived home to tell her parents she was not going back to high school and would become a musician instead. It was an uncomfortable decade. 

She managed to pay her rent and support a dog, though often it wasn't pretty, until she landed a position in the Baltimore Symphony in 2003 playing principal oboe. These full-time principal orchestral positions are considered by many to be the Holy Grail; she lived in the relative tremendous security this position provided for many years. During that time, she played nationally and internationally at some of the world's best venues with and without the orchestra. She trafficked in the works she was trained to play, the works classical music institutions prefer and celebrate: those of dead, white men.

In June 2019, the musicians of the Baltimore Symphony were locked out of the symphony hall with very little notice, banging pots and picketing on the streets after they were told their healthcare would be withdrawn. The musicians expected to be unpaid for a year or more. Once the veil of orchestral security was permanently lifted, Needleman found herself. Though the orchestra started working sooner than expected, Needleman was permanently changed.

Since then, Mx. Needleman has sought to evangelize a few ideas: the oboe can and should be played compellingly outside of an orchestra; music by composers who are not dead, white men should be embraced as a vehicle for cultural change and understanding; and the term “classical music” needs re-examining. 

In the nine months between the beginning of the BSO lockout and the Covid-19 pandemic, Needleman booked and played recitals in Philadelphia; Minneapolis; New York City; Oberlin, OH; Tampa; Northfield, MN; Madison, WI; Iowa City; Eau Clair, WI; Washington, D.C.; Montclair, NJ; Greensville, SC; and Greensboro, NC. These recitals were either for oboe alone (very rarely, if ever done before) or for the somewhat more standard combination of oboe and piano in (the very nonstandard) repertoire by women composers.

When the entire world of orchestral music took an enormous hit in March, 2020, with Covid-19, Needleman began performing from her living room. She delivered eleven weekly concerts that surveyed the repertoire for oboe alone in a way that had never been done before and had an audience of over 80,000 and counting. She played music that she wanted to play because she believed in its message. This spanned the canonical 300-year-old Telemann Fantasies and Benjamin Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid to countless premieres from a diverse group of composers to popular music. She has continued to put unrecorded repertoire by historically under-represented composers, mixed with a few “standard classics,” out in recordings for the public, frequently serving as her own pianist due to the current logistics of working with another pianist.

Needleman is currently in the process of incorporating her own compositions and a lifetime of improvisation into her more formal musical life. Since she began putting music to paper in late 2020, her works and arrangements have been played by members of the Dallas and London Symphonies. She has been commissioned by the International Double Reed Society and a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and has been published by Theodore Presser, Co. She is the artistic director and curator of Baltimore's "Coffee, Patisserie, and Classical Music" series, a very low-budget operation that has delivered numerous premieres, supports historically under-represented artists and composers, and explores the relationships between composers and performers in an informal setting.