CONTENT COURTESY 3MBS
Following a sold-out inaugural festival in 2021, 3MBS Fine Music Melbourne proudly presents Music, She Wrote on 6 – 8 April 2022. The festival moves from the suburbs to the city, held over three nights at the stunning Chapter House on Flinders Lane with a whole new line-up of Melbourne’s most celebrated, imaginative, and engaging classical, baroque and folk musicians.
“Music, She Wrote is a festival designed to bring women’s stories to life in their own musical voices,” says Artistic Director Katie Yap.
“Over three concerts, we explore the theme of resilience – something that women have had to cultivate over history, and we find ourselves as a society needing so deeply in a time full of change and uncertainty.”
RENEW
Thursday 7 April, 8 – 9.30pm (AEDT)
The second concert celebrates humanity’s ability to reinvent itself. Acclaimed baroque harpist Hannah Lane and soprano Chloe Lankshear* explore Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that for most of history, Anonymous was a woman. These acclaimed musicians take you back in time when women created in secret, alongside their sisters who could write under their own names – Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Campana, and Lucretia Orsina Vizana.
Then, we travel forward 500 years and half a world away, to the here and now. Folk duo Big Fiddle Little Fiddle explain: ‘We gathered around us music written or inspired by women we love and the brave and generous ways each navigates the often rocky and frequently precarious waters of life. In this way, the program is a small offering to all our female and gender-non-conforming loved ones and friends who constantly renew and replenish us with their relentless persistence and optimism.’
Known for their warmth of character, toe-tapping tunes, and genius harmonies, Big Fiddle Little Fiddle will leave you with a sense that, perhaps our world is a little brighter than how it might have seemed before.
REBEL
Friday 8 April, 8pm – 9.30pm (AEDT)
Long thought of as the weaker, gentler sex, society has always condemned women who rebel. Now, we see a wave of women who refuse to smile and accept their lot – Grace Tame, Rosy Batty, Brittany Higgins, amongst so many others. This concert celebrates rebellion in all its forms – internal, external, peaceful or not. Artistic director Katie Yap has assembled a festival string quartet especially for this concert, which brings together Kyla Matsuura-Miller and Emma Hunt (violins), Katie Yap (viola), and Elina Faskhi (cello). Beginning with one of America’s first published black female composers, Florence Price, they take on works by trailblazing Australian composers Elena Kats-Chernin, Hilary Kleinig and Emily Sheppard, finishing with the furiously triumphant fourth string quartet of Grażyna Bacewicz.
For full details and bookings visit 3mbs.org.au.
Featured image by Mark Lobo.
