Clonmel's Finding a Voice festival, a festival devoted exclusively to music by women, is happening online this year, the only way that's possible for it. The great Japanese marimba player Keiko Abe and percussionist/composer Evelyn Glennie are among the names represented in the opening programme performed by Alex Petcu, who will also play a new work by Elaine Agnew.

There will be songs by Pauline Viardot, marking the bicentenary of the birth of the great French singer and composer, for whom Berlioz made the now-dominant version of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice with Orfeo cast as a mezzo-soprano. That's in concert by soprano Kelley Lonergan, actor Aideen Wylde and pianist Gabriela Mayer.

Soprano Elizabeth Hilliard and pianist David Bremner have trawled the 19th and 20th centuries for works by Poldowski (real name Régine Wieniawski), Augusta Holmès (born in Paris to a father from Youghal, and who wrote a symphonic poem titled Irlande in 1882), Nadia Boulanger and Rhona Clarke.

And the Irish Baroque Orchestra's leader, Claire Duff, and harpsichordist Malcolm Proud play works by Isabella Leonarda and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, the latter one of the rare historic female composers to have made it onto LP in the 1950s through the advocacy of Thurston Dart.


Read the full article here: The Irish Times