Musica Vitale Brings Life to Widely Varied Program of Music by (Mostly) Female Composers at St. Paul's March 23

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I was able to go to the St. Paul’s concert last night on March 23 from 5 to about 6:15 p.m. It was given by a rather free-floating local group called “Musica Vitale” and was billed as “Celebrating Women in the Arts” as part of Women’s History Month in March. The personnel of Musica Vitale as of the March 23 concert were pianist Nonna Alakhverdova, violinist Olena Galytska, soprano Lisa Parente (whom I’d already heard giving a stunning performance as the soprano soloist in Saint-Saëns’ Oratorio de Noël last December), mezzo-soprano Julia Rahm, tenor John Yokoyama (a hauntingly beautiful young man who was listed on the program as “a student at San Diego State University, double-majoring in computer science and vocal performance” – alas, he only appeared as part of a vocal ensemble in the concert’s last two selections), bass-baritone Michael Sokol and “hosts” Penelope Hawkins and William Propp. There was also a mystery woman who sang and played harmonium on the concert’s second piece, “Nobilissima Veriditas” by Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098-1179), one of the most fascinating people in the history of Western philosophy and culture. Hildegard was the head of a convent, and as a result she didn’t have to deal with the limits placed on female artists who were frequently caught in between the social expectations of a woman’s “place” as a wife and mother and their own longings to express themselves artistically.

Though Hildegard has often been cited as the first known composer – the first person in history to whom we can ascribe specific pieces as their work – unfortunately, as Linda Holt wrote in a review of a piece called Ad Lucem based on Hildegard’s Ordo Virtutum (“Play of the Virtues”) in the January-February 2024 issue of Fanfare magazine, “Hildegard’s work does not come down to us in neatly catalogued sheafs of vellum, but in bits and pieces, with long works like Ordo Virtutum (arguably the first opera) entangled with snippets from the Roman Catholic liturgy. Nor, I suspect, did the indefatigable composer sit by a window, quill in hand, writing in the elegant musical notation of her time. The more likely scenario would be similar to the way in which Hildegard executed the paintings and writings that communicated her many visions. As abbess of a monastery, Hildegard instructed the nuns under her charge to sing and memorize her greatest hits and to paint portraits of her visions as she directed. In the case of the written word, the illiterate nun relied on her scribe, Volmar, to take dictation and publish her written thoughts. Delegation is nothing new.” I’m guessing the long-haired woman who came out with harmonium to perform “Nobilissima Veriditas” last night was Musica Vitale’s artistic director, Elena Vizuet, and the work was hauntingly beautiful as anyone who’s ever heard any of Hildegard’s music would expect. It came second in the program, though it had been scheduled to be third.

The concert opened with a song by Amy Beach (1867-1944), a highly talented woman who really got screwed over big-time by the sexist norms of her generation. Under her original name, Amy Marcy Cheney, she’d begun studying piano under her mother at age six and gave her first professional concert at 16. By 1896 she’d had a symphony performed in Boston, but in 1895 she married surgeon Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach and he stipulated that she could no longer teach or perform in public, aside from being allowed to give two concerts per year only for charities, and she could still compose and publish but her works had to be signed “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” Though Dr. Beach died in 1910, she continued to call herself “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach” in concerts and publications of her music, reverting to “Amy” only on one German tour because Germans didn’t understand what “Mrs.” meant. One of the “hosts” at last night’s concert quoted a review of one of Beach’s compositions by author and critic Rupert Hughes (uncle of the notorious multimillionaire eccentric Howard Hughes) which called her music “masculine” – which he did not mean as a compliment. The two pieces of Beach’s at last night’s concert were an opening song, “I send my heart,” to a text by Robert Browning, a love poem to his fiancée Elizabeth Barrett; and a later “Romance” for violin and piano, well played but a bit on the schlocky “salon” side of what was then called “light music.” After “Nobilissma Veriditas” came a piece called “Sicilienne” for violin and piano, ostensibly by Austrian composer Maria Theresia de Paradis (1759-1824), a family friend of Mozart, though narrator Propp claimed this might actually be a fake by 20th century male composer and violinist Samuel Dushkin (1891-1976), who’s best known for premiering Stravinsky’s violin concerto and constructing a violin-and-piano piece based on two of Gershwin’s piano preludes that were never published in solo piano form.

Following the “Sicilienne” violinist Galytska and pianist Alakhverdova played a “Cortège” by Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), one of the most tragic figures in music history because of her chronic illnesses, starting with bronchial pneumonia at age two and ending with her death from tuberculosis at only 24. In between she composed quite a lot, including a half-hour mini-opera called Faust et Hélène (based on the love scene between Faust and Helen of Troy in part two of Goethe’s Faust) which won the coveted Prix de Rome in 1913 (the first woman to do so). Much of her work consisted of short pieces with religious themes, including instrumentals based on various psalms, so I was surprised when “Cortège” turned out not to be the quiet, mournful piece I would have expected but fast, relentless and almost angry, and beautifully performed by Galytska and Alakhverdova. The rest of the program consisted of pieces by modern composers, including two songs from a cycle called Songs of Cifar by Gabriela Frank (b. 1972), whose opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”) was premiered by the San Diego Opera in 2022. The daughter of a Lithuanian Jewish father and a Peruvian mother of Chinese descent who met as Peace Corps volunteers in Peru, Frank has drawn on Latin American themes for her music. The two songs, “El Niño” and “Eufamia,” both are set to Spanish texts by Pablo Antonio Cuadra, and according to wisemusicclassical.com (https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/24541/Songs-of-Cifar-and-the-Sweet-Sea-vocal-version--Gabriela-Lena-Frank/) the cycle is still a work in progress; it’s currently half an hour long but is slated to run 70 minutes. Baritone Michael Sokol sang “El Niño” unaccompanied, while “Eufamia” featured Alakhverdova’s piano. The next piece, “Lullaby,” was by a male composer, Ricky Ian Gordon (b. 1956), though it was included because the text was by a woman, Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), and it was one of her cynical views about love and relationships which Sokol sang well even though it might have worked better with a woman singer.

At this point co-host Penelope Hawkins finally called out Galytska and Alakhverdova to perform Amy Beach’s “Romance,” and then came the final four pieces on the program: four songs by Lori Laitman (b. 1955), whom co-host Propp said was his cousin. Two of the texts, “I Am Nobody” (which soprano Parente introduced as “They Might Not Need Me”) and “If I,” were from poems by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), the famously reclusive 19th century New England poet who “solved” the problem of being a woman with creative urges by hiding out in her home, living off her family’s income and publishing only 10 poems during her lifetime. Most of her works since then were from a cache discovered by her sister Lavinia in 1890, four years after Emily’s death. The four-part harmony song “Relic,” from a cycle called Are Women People?, is based on a speech by feminist pioneer Susan B. Anthony, and it and the five-part song “If I” were the only selections on which Julia Rahm and John Yokoyama sang. In between was a satirical song called “Dreaming” with a text by Laitman herself about the desperate yearning of creative people for good reviews. The members of Musica Vitale have earned a good review – a great one, in fact – from me for their performance last night; they showcased a wide range of music spanning almost a millennium and made a great case for the composers they performed as well as for themselves. A lot of people who render unfamiliar classical music in public bring a numbing sense of duty to it; not the members of Musica Vitale, who as their name suggests sang and played with an intensity that breathed life into this music.