Resistance and Unity: Women Rise

• Reena Esmail: Zeher for Cello and Strings (Rhonda Rider, cello)
• Victoria Yagling: Suite for Cello & Strings (Rhonda Rider, cello)
• Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a      Theme of Thomas Tallis
• Warren Cohen: Concerto Grosso no. 1 for String Quartet and String Orchestra

With this concert of works for string orchestra, MusicaNova highlights women in classical music. This is fitting, because much of the string orchestra music we have today dates from the late 19thcentury, when women were allowed to learn only the piano or string, and were not allowed in mainstream orchestras.The string orchestra developed to give women as place to play music.

Forty-one-year-old American composer Reena Esmail introduces south Indian music in many of her compositions, including Zeher (the Hindi word for poison.) It was written while she was fighting a serious case of strep throat, which made it difficult for her to swallow, speak or, at times, breathe. It incorporates two raags in a call for healing, made more urgent by the piece’s premiere in March 2020.

Victoria Yagling was a Soviet-era cellist and composer who faced the same challenges as Shotakovich in the struggle to balance Soviet orthodoxy and develop her own voice. The regime throttled her career by refusing to allow her to travel and perform in capitalist countries, a restriction she escaped only by immigrating to Finland in 1990.

Cello soloist Rhonda Rider is on the faculty at the Berklee Conservatory in Boston. For more than two decades, she was a member of the Naumburg Award-winning Lydian Quartet and Triple Helix Piano Trio. Her interest in bringing classical music to unusual places, has led her to artist residencies at Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest National Parks.

Vaugh Williams’s famous Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis features two smaller orchestras playing against each other. Cohen repeats that approach in his Concerto Grosso, with a string quartet playing in opposition to the orchestra.