Katherine Needleman is a multi-faceted musician and native of Baltimore. She won first prize in the International Double Reed Society’s Gillet-Fox Oboe Competition in 2003, and then their Inaugural Commissioning Competition in 2020. Passionately devoted to the delivery of new music and exploration of the lines between composers and performers, Needleman has commissioned and premiered numerous works, both by living and dead composers. This season, she gives the United States premiere of Ruth Gipps’ Oboe Concerto with the Richmond Symphony and Valentina Peleggi, a  work which Needleman found to be languishing unplayed since its premiere in London eighty years ago. She gave the West Coast premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Oboe Concerto; Rouse chose Needleman to make the premiere recording with David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony. Similarly, Needleman premiered and recorded Kevin Puts’ oboe concerto, Moonlight, with the Baltimore Symphony and Marin Alsop. Needleman gave the United States premiere of Brenno Blauth’s Concertino as soloist and conductor with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. During the COVID-19 lockdown, she presented a series of eleven weekly solo oboe recitals including many premieres to an online audience of more than 75,000 and growing, starting from playing directly into an old laptop microphone, and progressing to using much fancier equipment and delivering a  performance from the middle of a cold lake, swimming to shore at the end. She brought her childhood piano skills to the public with several recordings made during lockdown, including both g minor oboe sonatas of J.S. Bach. She has been an improviser since early childhood, and released the album Marmalade Balloon with distinguished colleagues of the Mico Nonet. She started putting music on  paper during her time at home in the pandemic. She curates Coffee, Patisserie, and Classical Music at An Die Musik. She explores the connection between composer and performer in this series, focusing on music which has been unreasonably under-programmed for various reasons. She performs as an oboe recitalist throughout the US. As a day job, she is an orchestral oboist, having performed as guest principal with all of the US’s “Big Five” orchestras except for one as well as being the Baltimore Symphony’s principal oboist since 2003.