Breaking a Glass Ceiling
Conductor’s Note

Of Hollywood dance pair Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, it was famously said that she did everything he did...only backwards and in high heels. I’ve been savoring this quip since January, as The Cecilia Chorus of New York, our three debut soloists and I have been preparing the – incredible though this may seem – first-ever Carnegie Hall performance of any choral-orchestral work by Mozart’s once celebrated, subsequently neglected Viennese contemporary (and favored piano duet partner, for whose collaboration he wrote several four-hand sonatas): Marianna von Martines.

A child prodigy, Martines grew up on the third floor of a historic apartment building in central Vienna. Neighbors included Haydn (her keyboard teacher for three years; he lived in the attic), and the sought-after musician and voice teacher Nicholas Porpora (also third floor), who taught her singing. (Haydn – talk about luxury casting! – accompanied the lessons). The building’s ground floor was home to the influential princess of the wealthy, music-loving Esterházy family. The renowned poet Metastasio was, usefully, a family friend and mentor. He bequeathed the Martines family his fortune, an act of far-seeing beneficence that enabled Marianna to live out her life independently.

Fluent in German and Italian, conversant in French and English, Martines won admiration across the European continent as a singer and pianist – often, at court, for the Empress Maria Theresa – as well as composer, though (glass ceiling!) she was never able to seek a professional appointment. At the tender age of 29, she was the first woman ever elected to Europe’s leading musical society, the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna.

Should it be at all surprising that Martines’s musical setting of Psalm 110 proves in every way comparable to Mozart’s, effusing an at least equal pleasingness and sparkle? Thanks to her gifts and early training, Martines’s technical command is absolute. Her harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration are suavely correct and, just where you want them to be, piquantly imaginative, in the slyly alert manner of her time. She resonates forcefully with the psalm’s assertiveness, and her virtuosity as a singer gives rise to vocally idiomatic lines that effervesce in the throat. You’ll hear all of this for yourself as we juxtapose her Dixit Dominus with Mozart’s.

Also on the program: for the past decade, The Cecilia Chorus of New York has been proudly in the vanguard of musical organizations showcasing the talents of composers outside the mainstream (or about to enter it). Derrick Skye is a California-based composer who joyfully incorporates meters, rhythms and harmonies from Balkan, Hindustani, Persian, West African and Western European musical practices. His Neither Separated, Nor Undone is as generous, optimistic, and irresistible a fusion as you could want. Offsetting the other works is a triptych of folk song settings by Bartók, in which village women take their power by speaking their truth, with humor, grit, and heart.

–Mark Shapiro