Fanfare for female musicians
Goes to see a new series that celebrates forgotten talent at Kings Place in London
For most people, female composers are invisible. If pressed, they could muster a couple of names, probably Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn. In fact these two are only the tip of a very large iceberg. Women have always composed, in large numbers, but their works have stayed in the shadows, locked up in archives and shunted to footnotes in the history of music. Have they been put there by men to keep women in their place?
The saddest part of the story is how women eventually lost the spirit of self-assertion displayed by 17thcentury composers such as Francesca Caccini. By the 19th century, they were conniving at their own subjugation. “Women always betray themselves in their compositions,” said Schumann dismissively.
In recent decades, the pack-ice of this ancient prejudice has started to thaw and crack. Astonishingly gifted figures have emerged, championed by scholars and a few mostly female performers. They range from the medieval abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen to the blazingly original modernist Ruth Crawford Seeger, with hundreds or thousands more in between.
Institutions have been caught napping by these changes on the ground, but finally they are responding. Last year, more than half of the new pieces commissioned by the Proms came from women.
Now, with perfect timing, comes “Venus Unwrapped”, a series focused on female composers at that most enterprising of London’s music venues, Kings Place. With 140 composers spread over 95 concerts of music in all genres, this has a claim to be the most comprehensive survey of women in music ever devised – even though, as programme director Helen Wallace insists, it only scrapes the surface. It launched on Thursday with a concert divided between two great Venetian Baroque composers: Barbara Strozzi and Claudio Monteverdi. Strozzi was remarkable. She accepted her status as a cortigiana onesta or “cultured kept woman”, using it to gain access to courtly circles and to publishers: she had more of her own music in print than any male composer of the time. In this concert, we heard seven pieces from her First Book of Madrigals of 1644. They were performed by a group of nine singers alongside a lavish and gorgeously thrumming ensemble of lutes, harp, keyboards and strings drawn from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Soprano Mary Bevan was the star among the singers, and it must be said she was superb in Strozzi’s È pazzo il mio core (“My heart is crazy”), which she turned into a piece of heartrending vocal rhetoric. “It gets angry, it sighs, it laments, it grieves,” says the poem about the heart of the distracted lover, and Bevan made sure we felt all these twists and turns. At the end of the concert, in Monteverdi’s Ballo delle ingrate (Dance of the Ungrateful Ones), she struck a different tone of anguished penitence.
The singers of the choir of the OAE didn’t have Bevan’s ringing, eloquent way with the Italian texts, but they certainly had their moments. The instrumentalists were as enticing to hear as the singers, the sounds of harpist Joy Smith and lutenist Elizabeth Kenny entwined in a way that heightened the music’s eroticism, as well as its grace.
So did the woman come out on top, in this battle? Strozzi’s music was certainly more saltily flavoured in its portrayal of the mad passions expressed by the poetry. Monteverdi’s grand designs and striding basses seemed by comparison almost conventional, though of course it’s always been his music that defines what counts as normal for that era. Better to say that in Baroque music, as in music of every kind, what counts as normal and what counts as “the best” will have to be redefined, as the voices of women become heard. “Venus Unwrapped” will surely be a huge step in that direction.