An online petition calling on the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to apologize to violinist Esther Hwang has gone viral. As of this writing, it has now garnered more than 10,000 signatures since it was launched a week ago by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra principal oboist Katherine Needleman.
As Pancouver has previously reported, the petition also demands that the VSO “publicly commit to immediately end its use and enforcement of any agreement that restricts people from speaking about harassment, discrimination, sexual misconduct, or abuse”. It came in the wake of a December 17 article in the Globe and Mail in which Hwang revealed the existence of a non-disclosure agreement with the VSO.
In this piece, Hwang alleged that she was raped and sexually assaulted by a senior member of the orchestra while working as a VSO violin extra in 2017 and 2018. The Juilliard School alumna has stated that she was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to receive a settlement of $7,138.34.
After accepting the settlement, Hwang saw her workload decline in the 2019-20 season. When the VSO resumed concerts in the post-COVID lockdown era, she was no longer called back as a violin extra. She alleged that this amounted to retaliation. That prompted the VSO to commission an external investigation by the law firm Southern Butler Price.
Petition creator discloses investigation summary
Needleman has been a whistleblower in exposing sexual misconduct in the classical music world. Her Substack page includes the law firm’s investigation summary report that dismissed Hwang’s complaint of retaliation. Southern Butler Price found that the VSO’s conduct could be explained due to several factors.
They included: violin auditions held on January 21, 2019; the complainant declining several offers of work in 2019; and her drop from first or second to 10th on the violin extras list between October 2018 and April 2020. The summary report cited additional factors, such as an “unbiased” assessment of the complainant’s suitability to play extra in a 2020 survey and her rank of 16th on the 2020 extra list. The summary report pointed out that she was removed from the extras list at some point prior to February 2023 along with 13 others, and that she demonstrated a “failure and/or unwillingness to attend any violin hearings or auditions” with the VSO post-pandemic.
Needleman also published Hwang’s critical response to this report, which the violinist sent on September 29, 2025. Hwang opened her letter to VSO officials by asking if concertmaster Nicholas Wright thinks she is a good enough player to perform regularly with the VSO as an extra.
“If the answer is yes, then why did my call rate drop from 100% to 0%?” Hwang asked. “Nick clearly has the authority to change the extra list, as he was the one who unilaterally invited me to join the VSO and placed me at the top of the list.
“If the answer is no, then why did he invite me in the first place, and why did he keep me at the top of the list for over two years?” the violinist continued. “The Summary Report never reconciles this core inconsistency between Nick’s endorsement of my playing, and my later exclusion. Instead, it offers eight supposed ‘factors,’ most of which either restate outcomes or deflect from the real issue.”
She then went on to address each of these factors.
“In 2019/20, I declined 3.5 weeks plus ‘Salute to Vienna’. That is roughly the same as the annual vacation and ‘string relief’ time of a full-time violinist,” Hwang noted. “Yet by the end of that season, my call rate had gone to zero.”
She pointed out that other extras had declined work without losing their place. Furthermore, she claimed it was “implausible that someone Nick had personally placed at the top of the list would suddenly be dropped simply for turning down a handful of concerts”.
Hwang challenges other conclusions
As for the January 2019 violin auditions, Hwang declared that in the five subsequent months she was invited to perform at every single concert. Plus, she was still seated at the front of the extras, indicating that she remained either first or second on the list.
“Shortly after the audition and before I filed my complaint on March 28, 2019, Nick asked me to go for coffee,” Hwang stated in her response. “He told me he immediately recognized my playing during the audition (even though it was blind), thought I played very well, didn’t understand why I hadn’t advanced, and suggested I should be aiming to be concertmaster one day. I told the investigator about this, but the Summary Report doesn’t mention it. Why not?”
Moreover, Hwang alleged that her unnamed alleged rapist—who was not Wright—was on the audition panel. And she rejected the summary report’s conclusion that the 2020 assessment in a survey was unbiased because most members have no real opportunity to assess their peers’ playing unless they sat directly next to the musician in rehearsals or concerts.
“In practice, this kind of survey is less an evaluation of playing ability and more a popularity contest,” Hwang stated. “Calling it an ‘unbiased assessment’ is absurd.”
Hwang has sought without success to persuade the VSO to nullify the non-disclosure agreement. After the Globe and Mail published its story on December 17, a lawyer representing the VSO threatened litigation against Hwang if she didn’t cease and desist.
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