WONDER SISTERS: From Baroque to Bolero
Across four centuries and two continents, this program weaves breathtaking live music with spellbinding spoken word, spotlighting women who wrote, composed, and thought their way past every boundary set for them — and carrying their voices into the present, where they still have something to say.
It opens in Venice with the passionate Baroque cantatas of Barbara Strozzi, then crosses to Versailles for the dazzling instrumental music of prodigy Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. From behind convent walls come the sacred voices of Italy’s cloistered composers — Isabella Leonarda, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana, and Rosa Giacinta Badalla — women who turned enclosure into a conservatory. Threading through it all is the fiery intellectual poetry of Mexico’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
That legacy steps into our own time with a world premiere: arias by Francisco de la Huerta, newly revived from the archives of Spain’s Santa Ana de Ávila Monastery and sung for the first time in centuries.
The journey then arrives at the unstoppable power of popular song — two of Latin America’s most beloved boleros, Consuelo Velázquez’s sultry Bésame Mucho and Isolina Carrillo’s haunting Dos Gardenias, written by women and still sung on every continent today. From a Venetian salon to a Havana radio studio, these are women who claimed their voices and made the world listen. To perform their music in the 21st century is to honor them — and to make certain the listening continues.
MARCH TIME AND DATE TBA
