Program #94, March 7 2002: Women's history month begins...

In observance of Women's History Month, and just because I thought it would be an interesting exercise, I decided that all four programs during March would consist entirely of works by female composers. (Well, except for my usual theme music. So much for ideological purity, I guess.) The next week brought the next installment of the 20th century Theatre Pieces series, with Judith Weir's A Night at the Chinese Opera, and two weeks following that will be a review of the work of Sofia Gubaidulina for the Featured Composers series. The other two slots, including this one, were reserved for unthemed programs, in which I'd planned to present a wide range of works.

After getting started with a theme music substitution that nods in the direction of the last program I did featuring works by women, I tried to set the tone with two works centered on particular programmatic content explicitly or implicitly connected with the state of being a woman. The latter of these was a string quartet, and from there I proceeded under a roughly Cats and Dogs basis till about 2pm -- segueing mostly by instrumentation, and ending up back at the last Gosfield piece, which also involves a string quartet. (As it turns out, I probably went a tad heavy on the string quartets this evening, partly because I love them, and also because I had many good ones to choose from.) Then, during most of the last hour, I picked up a jauntily fun mini-opera about Marco Polo by local composer/performer Amy Denio -- its content provided a good warm-up for the Weir next week.