International Women's Day: a celebration!

It's time to celebrate International Women's Day, and alongside a number of fantastic programmes on BBC Radio 3, which is playing works by female composers all day, there's a lot more going on besides. Catch the new film Beyond the Grace Note about conductors who are female, on Sky Arts, directed by Henrietta Foster - 3pm today. Writer Anna Beer and composer Debbie Wiseman are giving a talk later today at Kellogg College, Oxford. Kathryn Stott has just announced a terrific range of music by women that will be heard later in the year at her Australian Festival of Chamber Music (more about that very soon). The list could continue.

For our own celebration here on JDCMB, I've assembled some of my favourite pieces by female composers, for your musical delectation. They are in no particular order and have not been chosen for any representative geographical or temporal spread. I've picked some because they are specially well played, others because they will have wide appeal, one because it shows the composer playing the violin, and all of them because they are fantastic pieces that ought to be performed more widely, as should the other music by their composers. If you are a musician and enjoy these, please use the selection as a jumping-off point for further exploration of their works and consider adding them to your repertoire.

Have a wonderful IWD, everyone!

CLARA SCHUMANN: PIANO TRIO, Op. 17. I personally think this is her best piece, but feel free to pick another if you prefer!

LOUISE FARRENC: SYMPHONY NO. 3. Ought to be 'standard repertoire' the world over.


GRAZYNA BACEWICZ performs her own OBEREK (1952) - chose this one because it is rare film of the composer playing her own music, but there are MANY wonderful pieces by her


BARBARA STROZZI: L'ERACLITO AMOROSO. If you like Monteverdi, you'll adore this. A beautifully made music-video film performed by Heather Newhouse and Le Concert de l'Hostel Dieu.


ROXANNA PANUFNIK: FOUR WORLD SEASONS, smashing violin concerto written for Tasmin Little. Here's the last movement, 'Indian Summer'.


ERROLLYN WALLEN: MIGHTY RIVER. Wonderful piece combining spirituals and contemporary techniques to reflect on slavery and freedom.


NICOLA LEFANU: TOKAIDO ROAD, chamber opera performed at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. A spare, sensitive, magical work inspired by the life of the artist Hiroshige.


VITEZLAVA KAPRALOVA: PARTITA FOR PIANO & ORCHESTRA. Martinu's star pupil (and more), she should have been a leading Czech voice of the 30s, but she died tragically at the age of 25. This is a dazzling and ruggedly challenging piece...


ELIZABETH MACONCHY: STRING QUARTET NO. 1. This is the just the first of a major series of quartets that should by rights be heard as often as certain other 20th-century cycles. Next, hear all her others.


SOFIA GUBAILDULINA: CHACONNE. Performed by the magnificent Sofya Gulyak. Any pianist looking for a contemporary work by a female composer to add to their regular concert repertoire should have a look at this brilliant piece right away.

In praise of Barbara Strozzi

Tomorrow evening I'm doing a pre-concert talk with Franck-Emmanuel Comte, conductor of the French baroque ensemble Le Concert d'Hostel-Dieu who are performing at the Institut Français in South Kensington. Above, you can hear an extract from the concert: Heather Newhouse sings Barbara Stozzi's L'Eraclito amoroso. Within just a few bars, the centuries collapse: every woman has been through this experience; each one of us can identify with every note. (Incidentally, in this video interpretation there is also a very wonderful cat.)

Like her compatriot Monteverdi, and her teacher, Cavalli, one gains the impression that there is nothing Strozzi will stop at in her music to bring out the ultimate degree of emotional expression. The unusual thing is that here is a woman writing music about a woman's raw, impassioned, devastating experience, in the 17th century. Monteverdi and others wrote of women's lost loves, and very effectively (try this), but there's an edge to Strozzi's lament which seems to rise from the depths of the soul - and unlike Monteverdi's Ninfa, she's unobserved by men calling her 'Miserella'.

Strozzi was termed "the most prolific composer - man or woman - of printed secular music in Venice" of her day. A poet as well as a composer, and a mother of four, she remained unmarried; she was the mistress of a patron of the arts who was the father of three of the children. Jealous contemporaries said she was a courtesan and the one famous portrait of her shows her with one breast exposed. The reality seems to have been that she was a phenomenally gifted artist who had been encouraged and well educated in music by her father, the librettist Giulio Strozzi. She was supposedly adopted, but most likely the illegitimate daughter of Strozzi and a family servant. An 'outsider', therefore, in terms of social position and artistic inclination, she forged a remarkable and individual path as a musician, with enormous tenacity.

Tomorrow's concert explores not only Strozzi, but also the French composer Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Strozzi's similarly prolific compatriot Antonia Bembo, also a pupil of Cavalli. Heather Newhouse sings, the cellist is Benoît Morel and Franck-Emmanuel Comte is at the harpsichord. Our talk is at 6.30pm and the concert at 7.30pm. More details and booking here.