Jerusalem will fill its concert halls on October 16 and 17 for the fifth edition of the Witches? Festival, a two-day program at the YMCA and Hansen House tracing women's influence on music from medieval and ancient eras to 20th-century jazz. The city still lives with the shadow of the war that followed Oct. 7, and festival organizers say that shadow has shaped what they put on stage.
A Festival Shaped by War
David Shemer, founder-conductor-artistic director of the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra (JBO), initiated the festival. The orchestra performs predominantly baroque scores. Earlier editions explored fate, warrior women and healing women. Then the war came.
“Then we had the [post-Oct. 7] war and, you know, things always resonate,” said cellist-conductor Orit Messer-Yaakobi, a longtime JBO member and principal cellist. This year's theme is Echo. The program centers on women whose presence and work changed music, rather than only on those whose contributions people suppressed or overlooked.
Messer-Yaakobi said each concert takes a different approach. Some focus on women with initiative, women who wrote and performed their own music. Others look at patrons, muses or heroines. “We want to give women their place without the [politically-oriented] crutches,” she said. “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
The opening concert, “Daphnis and the Winds of Love: A Balkan Myth,” runs October 16 at 11 a.m. at Hansen House. Messer-Yaakobi will perform on cello with recorder player Doret Florentin and guitarist Gideon Bretler, joined by the Hakdoshot vocal threesome. At 10 p.m. that night, “High Heels” brings 1940s and 1950s swing to the YMCA Arcade, with three female vocalists and a piano-led jazz trio. “You can just enjoy life,” Messer-Yaakobi said.
The “A Woman's Song” recital addresses love, motherhood, and war and peace through texts voiced by female characters, including mythological or religious figures and mothers. The festival says these texts form a storyline that feels personal and universal, historical and relevant to the present.
The Israeli Romantic Ensemble performs “Vienna-Weimar-Siberia: A Journey with Musical Women” on October 17 at 11 a.m. Clarinetist Gili Rinot leads the foursome through works by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Bach. The program honors women who worked behind the scenes. Thérèse von Trattner gave Mozart accommodation and financial support and organized his subscription concerts in Vienna in 1784, 242 years ago as of today. The program also salutes German Jewish philanthropist Sara Levy, Mendelssohn's great-aunt, who supported his writing, and French cellist Lise Cristiani, to whom Mendelssohn dedicated a piece in his Songs Without Words series.
The Nari Ensemble quartet performs “The Golden Apple,” following an angel and a man who search for a woman worthy of a golden apple. They encounter biblical heroines from Eve to Esther through Baroque works from Bohemia, Italy, England and Germany. At 1:30 p.m., “Virtuosissima cantatrice” celebrates Barbara Strozzi, a 17th-century Venetian composer and vocalist whose scores were among the few by women that publishers printed. Soprano Daniela Skorka sings, with violinist Kati Debretzeni and Shemer on harpsichord.
The Finale
The festival closes at the YMCA on October 17 at 8:30 p.m. with “Cleopatra and Giulio.” Mezzo-soprano Shaked Bar performs Cleopatra while the full JBO plays music by Handel, Johann Adolph Hasse, Antonio Sartorio and Carl Heinrich Graun. The arias explore the relationship between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, with Bar moving between the two characters.
Messer-Yaakobi said the format lets participants dig deep. “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. Witches? avoids “run-of-the-mill stuff” and “bestsellers” such as Bach's Magnificat, she said. The orchestra invites outside artists and ensembles to propose programs, then hosts them.
Why This Matters: Cultural life in Jerusalem continues under the weight of a war that Israelis did not choose. A festival staging women's music from Venice to Weimar, in a city whose adversaries openly call for its destruction, reflects a society still investing in pluralism and open artistic inquiry. Organizers say the war resonates in their programming. That fact belongs in any account of what Israelis are defending when they insist on security: the ordinary freedoms of a democracy, including the freedom to hold a baroque concert on a Friday morning.