On Sunday January 26th at 2pm, Chamber Music at Bethany will trace the music inspired by Song of Songs. Featuring 2019 Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman and Dan O'Connell on french horn along with CM@B Co-Directors cellist Nick Photinos and pianist Yasuko Oura, the program features music across five centuries inspired by one of the most intimate and sensual poems of all time, the Song of Songs. This erotic love poetry at the end of the Bible (seriously, check it out) has inspired centuries of composers from the middle ages to today, and we'll offer works from Monteverdi to Britten and beyond exploring this unabashedly lush text.

Program:
Britten: Canticle I: "My beloved is mine and I am his", Op. 40
Tanaka: Song of Songs
Wilson: Mvmts 1, 5, 6,9 from Musings: An Ode to the Greek Muses
Caccini: Chi e costei
Monteverdi: Vespers Nigra Sum
Rachmaninoff: Sonata for Cello and Piano, Mvmt. III. Andante
Britten: Canticle III: "Still falls the rain", Op. 55

Our March 22nd concert, Half the Sky, features female composers at the dawn of the 20th century, still overlooked and undervalued compared to their male contemporaries. Featuring soprano Emily Birsan, the concert highlights unheard and overlooked masterpieces of vocal and chamber music by Cecile Chaminade, Rebecca Clarke, and Pauline Viardot, among others.

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.