Jerusalem’s Witches? Festival will bring concerts exploring women’s influence on music and culture to the YMCA and Hansen House on October 16-17. Its fifth edition, themed “Echo,” traces women’s musical contributions from medieval and ancient eras to 20th-century jazz, focusing on women whose presence and work changed music.
A Festival Built Around Musical Discovery
David Shemer, founder-conductor-artistic director of the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra (JBO), started the festival. The orchestra performs predominantly baroque scores. Earlier editions explored fate, warrior women and healing women.
Cellist-conductor Orit Messer-Yaakobi, a longtime JBO member and principal cellist, said the festival gives participants time to examine a subject from several perspectives. “I am very happy with the festival because it allows us to take an immersive approach to a particular subject,” she said. Inviting other ensembles, she said, lets them “research and deeply explore a specific topic.”
Messer-Yaakobi said the festival avoids “run-of-the-mill stuff” and “bestsellers” such as Bach’s Magnificat. Different ensembles and programs come together in concerts held in what she called beautiful locations.
The theme resonates personally amid the war following Oct. 7. “Then we had the [post-Oct. 7] war and, you know, things always resonate,” Messer-Yaakobi said. The new program, she explained, takes several approaches to women who showed initiative, wrote and performed music, served as patrons or muses, or appeared as 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].”
Concerts Across Eras and Genres
The opening concert, “Daphnis and the Winds of Love: A Balkan Myth,” takes place October 16 at 11 a.m. at Hansen House. Messer-Yaakobi will play cello with recorder player Doret Florentin and guitarist Gideon Bretler, alongside the Hakdoshot vocal threesome. The program travels from Greek mythology to contemporary material, combining French Baroque music and folk melodies.
That evening, “High Heels” brings swing music from the 1940s and 1950s to the YMCA Arcade at 10 p.m. Three female vocalists and a piano-led jazz trio will perform outdoors. Messer-Yaakobi called it “something cute with a very different color,” adding, “You can just enjoy life.”
The recital “A Woman’s Song” explores love, motherhood, war and peace through texts voiced by female characters, among them mythological or religious figures and mothers. The festival says the texts form a storyline that is personal and universal, historical and relevant to the present.
At 11 a.m. on October 17, the YMCA hosts “Vienna-Weimar-Siberia: A Journey with Musical Women.” The Israeli Romantic Ensemble, a foursome led by clarinetist Gili Rinot, performs works by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Bach. The program looks at women who worked behind the scenes as students, patrons, musicians and salon hosts.
Women Behind the Music
Mozart taught Franziska von Jacquin, for whom he composed Piano Sonata No. 14 and Fantasia in C minor, and Thérèse von Trattner. She gave him accommodation and financial support, promoted his work and organized subscription concerts in Vienna in 1784. Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 14, 15 and 16 appeared on those programs.
The program also honors German Jewish philanthropist Sara Levy, Mendelssohn’s great-aunt, who supported his writing, and French cellist Lise Cristiani. Her musicianship moved Mendelssohn to dedicate a piece in his Songs Without Words series to her.
Other concerts include “The Golden Apple,” with the Nari Ensemble quartet, and “Virtuosissima cantatrice,” celebrating 17th-century Venetian composer and vocalist Barbara Strozzi. On October 17 at 8:30 p.m., the festival closes with “Cleopatra and Giulio,” featuring mezzo-soprano Shaked Bar as Cleopatra and music performed by the JBO. Messer-Yaakobi said the finale brings the full orchestra together, while other concerts use chamber ensembles.