Jerusalem's Witches? Festival will bring music shaped by women to the YMCA and Hansen House on October 16-17, with a program spanning ancient eras, medieval times and 20th-century jazz. Its fifth edition takes “Echo” as its theme, focusing on women whose presence and work changed music—not just those whose contributions were suppressed or overlooked.
Who gets heard
David Shemer, founder-conductor-artistic director of the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra (JBO), launched the festival. Cellist-conductor Orit Messer-Yaakobi, a longtime JBO member and principal cellist, said the gathering gives performers time to study a subject from different angles. “When you have a festival, which lasts just a few days, and you invite other ensembles to take part, that allows us to research and deeply explore a specific topic,” she said. “We can address it from all sorts of perspectives, and that makes it very interesting and very daring.”
The festival has previously taken up fate, warrior women and healing women. “Then we had the [post-Oct. 7] war and, you know, things always resonate,” Messer-Yaakobi said. For this edition, she said, “Each concert takes a different approach – either about women with initiative, women who wrote and performed their music, or patrons or muses, or heroines.”
Messer-Yaakobi said the festival wants “to give women their place without the [politically-oriented] crutches.” She added: “And the gender is of no importance. It is just by chance that the composer is a woman [with regard to the quality of the work in question].” The program puts women’s influence at its center, while also making that point clear.
A program beyond the familiar
The opening concert, “Daphnis and the Winds of Love: A Balkan Myth,” is set for October 16 at 11 a.m. at Hansen House. Messer-Yaakobi will perform on cello with recorder player Doret Florentin and guitarist Gideon Bretler, accompanied by the Hakdoshot vocal threesome. The program moves among Greek mythology, contemporary material, French Baroque music and folk melodies.
That day, at 10 p.m., “High Heels” brings swing music from the 1940s and 1950s to the YMCA Arcade. Three female vocalists and a piano-led jazz trio will play outdoors. Messer-Yaakobi called it “something cute with a very different color,” adding, “You can just enjoy life.” Another recital, “A Woman's Song,” explores love, motherhood, war and peace through texts voiced by female characters, including mythological or religious figures and mothers. The festival describes the texts as a storyline that is personal and universal, historical and relevant to the present.
Patrons, performers and heroines
On October 17 at 11 a.m., the YMCA hosts “Vienna-Weimar-Siberia: A Journey with Musical Women.” The Israeli Romantic Ensemble, a foursome led by clarinetist Gili Rinot, will perform works by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Bach, while the program examines women who worked as students, patrons, musicians and salon hosts.
Mozart's students included Franziska von Jacquin, for whom he composed Piano Sonata No. 14 and Fantasia in C minor, and Thérèse von Trattner, who gave him accommodation and financial support, promoted his work and organized subscription concerts in Vienna in 1784. Those concerts included Mozart's Piano Concertos Nos. 14, 15 and 16. The program also salutes German Jewish philanthropist Sara Levy, Mendelssohn's great-aunt, who supported his writing, and French cellist Lise Cristiani, whose musicianship led Mendelssohn to dedicate a piece in his Songs Without Words series to her.
Other concerts follow women through staged stories and vocal works. “The Golden Apple” follows an angel and a man seeking a woman worthy of receiving a golden apple and bringing the mother of Jesus into the world; its biblical heroines, from Eve to Esther, appear through Baroque works from Bohemia, Italy, England and Germany. On October 17 at 1:30 p.m., soprano Daniela Skorka, violinist Kati Debretzeni and Shemer on harpsichord perform “Virtuosissima cantatrice,” celebrating Barbara Strozzi, a 17th-century Venetian composer and vocalist whose work won praise and whose scores ranked among the few by women to be printed. Strozzi was the illegitimate child of a servant and ran an important music salon.
The festival closes October 17 at 8:30 p.m. with “Cleopatra and Giulio.” Mezzo-soprano Shaked Bar plays Cleopatra, and the JBO performs music by Handel, Johann Adolph Hasse, Antonio Sartorio and Carl Heinrich Graun. Bar shifts between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar as the arias explore their relationship. Messer-Yaakobi said the finale brings together the full JBO ensemble; other concerts use chamber ensembles. The JBO invites outside artists and ensembles to propose programs, which it hosts.