Enjoy this week’s interesting stories!
On Sunday November 9, 2025 the Chamber Orchestra of Barrington at St. John’s will present a concert of music by Beethoven, Bloch, and Farrenc. The headlining symphony on this concert will be the infrequently-heard Symphony No. 3 by Louise Farrenc, one of the great women composers of the Romantic era. COBSJ “is proud to champion timeless works by distinguished women composers of the past,” including this work that ” powerfully demonstrates the dramatic range and expressive potential of the orchestra.” (East Bay RI)
Farrenc wrote her Symphony No. 3 in G minor in 1847. The Orchestre de la Société des concerts du Conservatoire gave the premiere two years later in 1849. Opera reigned supreme in Paris—and therefore in French musical culture writ large—at the time, and this meant that many ensembles were reluctant to program what they saw as unfashionable music. Fortunately for us and for her, her secure professorship at the Paris Conservatoire meant that she had the resources and connections to wait for a willing ensemble to take up the premiere. Her historically significant professorship wasn’t only ensuring that her compositions got regular hearings; she was the only woman to hold a post of that rank at the Paris Conservatoire during the entire 19th century, and she achieved equal pay to her male colleagues in comparable appointments in 1850 after what is perhaps her best-known work, the Nonet, premiered. BWT — Farrenc’s Symphony n. 3 is a work that we publish!
Below is a recording of Farrenc’s Third Symphony, performed in 2018 by the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra directed by Mikko Franck.
On Wednesday October 29, 2025 the American Composers Orchestra will present its program The New Virtuoso: For Art’s Sake at Zankel Hall (Carnegie Hall) under the baton of conductor Mélisse Brunet. The program will feature five premieres by five composers chosen by the orchestra: Mazz Swift, Raven Chacon, Tamar Muskal, Aaron Israel Levin, and Elijah Daniel Smith. Four of these pieces are world premieres, and one (Chacon’s) is a New York premiere. The full program notes for the concert are available in advance.
Mazz Swift – Erika Kapin Photography
Mazz Swift (they/them) has written a composition with an unusual method: Memory FIVE: Freedom Initiate for Conductrix and Orchestra. It is based on the work of an “improvising conductor” or “conduction” where the artist composes by conducting—a method pioneered by jazz musician Butch Morris. Morris used a series of precise hand gestures to signal for different kinds of sounds; he brought them out of musicians, singers and sometimes poets, too, as he told NPR’s News and Notes in 2008. “I teach a vocabulary to an ensemble, but we don’t rehearse the music we’re going to perform,” he said. “The performance is really an instant of composition, in many ways … I realized there is a great divide between what is notated and what is improvised and I wanted to discover, to understand what that divide was.” (NPR: “Remembering Butch Morris” 2013) Swift’s idea of the conductrix they’ve called for in Memory FIVE: Freedom Initiate is based on the same method. They also use Morris’s method to great effect on their debut album, The 10000 Things: PRAISE SONGS for the iRiligious (New Amsterdam Records, 2024), which is available to stream & purchase via BandCamp in case you’re interested in a taste of their style before the 29th.
Tamar Muskal – Luna Composition Lab
Tamar Muskal has written a composition for voice, interactive kinetic sculpture and orchestra, called Square Off. It will feature guest soloists Lucy Fitz Gibbon (soprano) and Daniel Rozin (interactive kinetic sculpture). Muskal is no stranger to pairing music with different texts to evoke particular themes: she received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her 2005 piece The Yellow Wind that featured texts by David Grossman, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Natan Alterman, Natan Yonatan and Mahmoud Darwish (Israeli and Palestinian poets). She was composer-in-residence for the Westchester Philharmonic and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.
Below is a collection of recordings and interviews with Muskal. It is bookmarked where she begins discussing her The Yellow Wind, though the chamber music elsewhere in the video is also well worth a listen. (Note to listeners: the piece she discusses concerns the long-term conflict in Palestine & Israel and includes excerpts from poetry by Israeli and Palestinian poets; the piece and the interview were both completed before the events of the last few years.)
On November 7th & 8th, Tempesta Di Mare — the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra & The Choir of Girard College will present their program Hidden Virtuosas: Agata’s Cantata at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral (23 South 38th Street, University City). It will feature the North American premiere of Agata Cantora della Pietà’s cantata Ecce nunc, which sets the text of Psalm 133. The piece has been restored by Richard Stone, co-director of the orchestra. Tickets are available here. These concerts are part of the Hidden Virtuosas project which includes a Symposium on Nov. 1.
Agata della Pietà lived her entire life at the Ospedale della Pietà—one of four Ospedali Grandi in Venice—a convent, orphanage, and music school originally run as a charitable institution by Venetian nuns. It was established in the fourteenth century, but by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its music school had developed such a good reputation that it offered musical training to some paying adolescent students as well as to the orphans who lived there. (It was active until 1830.) The all-female ensembles of the Ospedali were known throughout Europe for their skill; the four Ospedali Grandi regularly competed with each other to produce the highest-quality concerts. When Agatha was 11 (c. 1723) she would have begun her more advanced musical training as part of the coro; she would have added this to her routine of observing the Divine Offices, religious study, community chores, and additional studies in reading, arithmetic, spinning, and lace making.
A member of the Australian Chamber Choir Elizabeth Anderson, was responsible for finding parts for Agata’s setting of Ecce nunc in the Benedetto Marcello Library (Venice), and she used them to reconstruct a working version of the piece that could be played for public presentation. Musicologist Vanessa Tonelli spent much of her 2020 COVD-19 lockdown in Venice, and it is thanks to her that we have some of the more intimate details that we do about Agata’s life in the Ospedale. Further research on Agata and the women musicians of Venice can be read here, as well as in Tonelli’s recently published essay ‘Making a Name in Music: Professional and Social Strategies of the Musicians at the Venetian Ospedali Maggiori.’ (Non-Elite Women’s Networks across the Early Modern World, ed. E.S. Cohen and M.J. Couling, Amsterdam University Press, 2023).
In addition to the North American premiere of Agata’s cantata, four modern world premieres of works written for Ospedale musicians will be performed. For two of these, there is an unusual distinction of having the historical cadenzas available in the modern restored versions—not a common occurrence until manuscripts in the late 19th century. Cadenzas in these works were common, of course, but performers had freedom to improvise and reference other material as they saw fit, to the extreme of sometimes interjecting other short pieces that they were famous for singing into the performance of a long work such as an opera. Andrea Bernasconi’s Cessate ire furores (motet) with cadenzas by Fortunata dalla Pietà (ca. 1748); Antonio Martinelli’s Concerto in C, with cadenzas by Chiara dall’Violino della Pietà (ca.1730); Pietro Domenico Paradies’s “Sinfonia” and “Aria” from his opera Le muse in gara (1740); and Giovanni Porta’s “Aria” from his opera Il ritrato dell’eroe (1726) will offer some important insights into the kinds of music that Agata was performing and hearing as she wrote Ecco nunc.
Included here is the 2024 recording by the Australian Chamber Choir with Baroque instrumentation.
Let us know what you’re listening to! Email us at info@wophil.org