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Barbara Strozzi: Virtuosissima Sirena
Barbara Strozzi: Ariette a voce sola, Op. 6 / Miroku, Rambaldi
Barbara Strozzi had the good luck to be born in 1619 in Venice, in a world rich in creativity, intellectual ebullience and artistic freedom. She became well-known as a composer and singer, and published eight collections of vocal music (125 chamber cantatas) without the support of the Church or the patronage of an aristocratic family. Her works were included in important anthologies published in Europe and England. She died in Padua, in 1677. She was the adoptive daughter of Giulio Strozzi, and very probably his natural daughter; in order to promote her shows, in 1637 the poet founded the Accademia degli Unisoni. The very limited biographical information we have about Barbara’s private life reveals the personality of a woman endowed with extraordinary talent, beauty, intellect and entrepreneurship. Her Op. 6, published in Venice in 1657, includes cantatas and stanza arias. These compositions show the influence of Claudio Monteverdi, and are characterised by a great expressiveness based on the force of music, which always highlights and magnifies the emotions transmitted by the text. This programme presents some Ariette and is enriched by short pieces for solo harpsichord. The harpsichord introductions to the Ariette come from the seventeenth-century manuscript Chigi Q.IV.27, preserved in the Biblioteca Vaticana in Rome. This manuscript contains a series of anonymous preludes, whose style of composition is reminiscent of that of Barbara Strozzi.
Strozzi:"Listen, Lovers!"
A young female singer in 17th-century Venice: she is a virtuoso and extremely charming, and the gentlemen of her select audience are at her feet. They call her the "Singing Venus". But Barbara Strozzi wants more: she regularly publishes her compositions – more than any woman before her. The new BR-KLASSIK audio biography tells her story.
Until the 20th century, female composers had a hard time in a male-dominated art. And in historiography for even longer: it was not until 1978 that a female American musicologist published the first specialist article on Barbara Strozzi. Today, it is generally accepted that she is one of the most important voices in the history of vocal chamber music. She is featured on a growing number of CDs, concert programmes and websites. However, although research has begun, a lively account of her life and work, accessible to a wider audience, has been lacking.
This audio biography brings together all the key documents and research that represent her – and also vividly introduces us to the unique cultural space in which the composer lived. The exuberance of Carnival, the development of the fledgling art of opera, and Venice - the"città galante"- are all linked to the phenomenon of"Barbara Strozzi" and her art. Listeners unfamiliar with this music are invited to rediscover lost treasures – and to get to know one of the great women of music history. Wiebke Puls, an actress at the Münchner Kammerspiele and a singer herself, lends her voice to Barbara Strozzi.
Duets
Strozzi: Voices of Longing
Strozzi: Sacri musicali affetti / Aurata Fonte Ensemble
| The present release is a world premiere recording of the complete edition of the Sacri Musicali Affetti by Barbara Strozzi, a figure of great importance among the various women musicians of the seventeenth century. Her works went on printed editions for her to be recognized and appreciated as a composer, and not just as an instrumentalist or singer. She was on the Venetian intellectual scene thanks to her connection with the poet and playwright Giulio Strozzi (of whom Barbara is most likely an illegitimate daughter), a fundamental figure in the institution of the Venetian musical theater, and soon appreciated by musicians and writers of cultural circles from Venice. The Aurata Fonte ensemble, specializing in the Renaissance and Baroque repertoire, accompanies the sopranos Anna Simboli and Miho Kamiya with period instruments in the performance of this collection of sacred motets for solo voice where the composer's mastery and refinement is revealed by alternating theatrical and dramatic effects in the name of a marked vocal virtuosity. To be noted at one point the explicit mentioning of the great Claudio Monteverdi, placing by right her work in his musical wake. |
Electric Fields
Female Composers
What would it mean to 'compose like a woman'? The present collection answers the question, in a literal sense, while undoing the premise on which the question was asked in the first place. In social and historical terms, it means enjoying privileges of upbringing, education, and/or wealth that were historically denied to the vast majority of women. It means, on the part of the women represented here, a single-minded determination in pursuit of their vocation, helping them to overcome prejudice and sexism in a cultural, social and political milieu that has consistently denied women the opportunity to find and express their own voice in music. Only with movements of emancipation in the last century, and much more rapidly in the last 50 years, has this situation begun to be addressed and corrected. What composing like a woman does not mean - as the music in this collection makes clear - is a definable set of qualities or characteristics to the music itself which would distinguish the work of female composers from the music composed by men.
This remarkable set gathers many individual recordings of music by women composers, which Brilliant Classics has quietly yet actively championed in their catalogue for decades, uniting it with exciting new outings, so that a comprehensive historical picture of the highly varied struggles and successes of women composers through the ages to our present time are chronicled and celebrated.
Other information:
- Recordings date from 1994-2024
- Booklet in English contains liner notes by Peter Quantrill
- The revival of interest in female classical composers reflects a growing recognition of their overlooked contributions to music history.
For centuries, women composers were marginalized, their works overshadowed by their male counterparts. However, recent efforts by musicians, scholars, and institutions have brought these composers into the spotlight, highlighting the richness and diversity of their compositions.
- This renewed focus stems from a broader movement toward inclusivity in the arts, challenging traditional narratives that have historically excluded women. The rise of feminist musicology has also played a key role, offering fresh perspectives on these composers' lives and works.
- This comprehensive box set offers a wide spectrum of works by female composers, from the Medieval mystic Hildegard Von Bingen (1098-1179), through the Renaissance Isabella Leonarda (baptized 1620-1704), Francesca Caccini (1587-1640) und Barbara Strozzi (baptized 1619-1677), traversing the Baroque and Classical eras, and arriving in the contemporary field, with composers such as Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) and Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969).
- A long due homage to the art and voice of female composers, spanning nearly a thousand years!
Menestrel
Heroines of Love & Loss / Hughes, Brinkmann, Nordberg
The women appearing before our ears throughout this program range from the Virgin Mary and Dido, queen of Carthage, to Shakespeare's Desdemona and the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, waiting for her execution in the Tower of London in 1536. But the disc also features four other heroines - the Italian composers Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana and Barbara Strozzi. All active between 1590 - 1675, they will have required great courage to rise above the social conventions of the time, but this surprisingly productive period for female composers also offered an opportunity that would disappear in later centuries: the all-female environment provided by the convent. More than half of the women who published music before 1700 were nuns, including Sessa and Vizzana, who are here represented by brief meditations on teh suffering and death of Christ. Caccini and Strozzi, on the other hand, lived very much in the secular world - Caccini at the Florentine court and Strozzi as a free-lance musician and composer in Venice. Unhindered by the restrictions imposed by the church on sacred music they both adhered to the new stile moderno championed by Claudio Monteverdi. Celebrated for their singing, they composed vocal music which makes 'the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant', to quote Monteverdi's brother Giulio Cesare. The soprano Ruby Hughes has already made her name for herself in a wide-ranging repertoire, but has a special love for the constellation of lute, cello and voice. With Jonas Nordberg and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann - who also contribute instrumental solos - she here reveals in the dramatic and expressive potential offered by this trio combination, and by the music by these female composers and their English colleagues Henry Purcell and John Bennet.
From Rome to Vilnius
Monteverdi, Strozzi, Caccini, Peri & Frescobaldi: Sweet Obl
Arianna in Rome - Arias, cantatas & laments for the 17th-cen
Ballard: Premier livre de luth, 1611 / Kolb
