Discovering Two Baroque Female Composers

This afternoon I made my first visit of the season to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. More specifically, I attended a performance by seven vocalists in the Baroque Ensemble accompanied by six student instrumentalists occasionally joined by Director Corey Jamason at the harpsichord. The program celebrated two female composers of the Baroque period. The earlier of these was Francesca Caccini, a major figure at the Medici court. The other was Isabella Leonarda, who spent almost all of her life in an Ursuline convent in Novata. The program was organized to devote the first half to Caccini, with Leonarda featured after the intermission.

Little is known of either composer; and, where Caccini is concerned, most of her compositions have been lost. As a result the concert as a whole amounted to a take-what-you-can-get affair. In the “absence of representative data,” as they say, it is hard to know quite how to approach the music that was performed. The best approach is to dwell on what is most memorable and let the remainder pass with little notice.

In that respect only one selection remains in memory after having experienced the program in its entirety. The composition was “Lasciatemi qui solo” (leave me alone here), one of the songs published in Caccini’s Il primo libro delle musiche in 1618. This was sung by soprano Chea Kang accompanied only by Mario To playing theorbo. The text being sung (author not identified) tended to be on the clunky side; but Kang’s approach to phrasing achieved a level of attention that was not matched by most, if not all, of the other selections on the program. Indeed, in contrast, the second half of the program left the impression that, while Leonarda could be impressively inventive in writing for instruments, those inventions never did very much justice to the words being sung.

Perhaps the fairest assessment of this afternoon’s program is that not all discoveries of previously unknown (or little known) music turn out to be a treasure trove of “previously hidden gems.”