Our March 22nd concert, Half the Sky, features female composers who have persisted throughout the ages. Featuring soprano Emily Birsan, who Opera News called “Bright and Glittering,” as well as violinist Sang Mee Lee, winner of numerous competitions and faculty at the Music Institute of Chicago, the concert spans music from the ninth century Byzantine chant of Kassia to music just a few years old by Chicago's own Stacy Garrop, as well as works by Alma Mahler, Pauline Viardot, and Rebecca Clarke. Award-winning Filipina-American actress & speaker Mae Flores will also share her own story.

Purchase tickets at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chamber-music-at-bethany-half-the-sky-tickets-93700030313

Our last concert on May 7, Empowered, will feature soprano Emily Pogorelc, praised for her "lively, incisive soprano" by the New York Times, in chamber music inspired by strong female characters. This concert will feature John Harbison's Mirabai Songs--Mirabai, a 16th-century Hindu mystic poet, was 27 when her husband was killed in a war. She refused to die on her husband's funeral pyre, as was the custom, and instead left her family compound, wrote poems to Krishna, and sang and danced them in the streets.