Tiffany Du Mouchelle, soprano
Soprano Tiffany Du Mouchelle will perform A few Words to Sing, a program celebrating women's voices, life, love, and song. Throughout the ages women's voices have been repressed. Those who have found the strength to speak against their repression have often faced exile or even death.
Beginning in the Middle Ages we hear the troubadour Rudel's song about courtly love in Saariaho's Lonh, Chaucer's description of the Wife of Bath and her views on marriage from Trimble's Four Fragments from the Canterbury Tales, and the voice of Hildegard of Bingen as she sings her devotion to love and God in Viñao's Hildegard's Dream.
Returning to the present day, the physicality of vocal repression is explored through Berio's Sequenza III. William Harvey's song cycle Speaking for the Afghan Woman illuminates words of women who's voices have been caged in contemporary society: poems by Afghan female poets, including Bahar Saeed and Parwin Pajwak who were forced into exile along with Nadia Anjuman and Menna Keshwar Kamal who were both murdered in response to their words being heard.
The program concludes with Only by Feldman, as an elegy to those who suffer in silence.
Tiffany Du Mouchelle will be joined by Rachel Beetz, flute; Kyle Adam Blair, piano; Todd Moellenberg, harpsichord; and Ariana Warren, clarinet.