#WOMAN

This cross-genre concert project brings women’s voices in music history and contemporary music to the fore.

Across several formats, fascinating personalities and their musical work are explored. A key element is the use of spoken introductions within the concerts: the biographies of the women composers are placed in their social and historical contexts, creating an accessible point of entry and encouraging reflection on inequalities that continue to the present day.

The classical art-song recital mothers. lovers. revolutionists. – Portraits of Women Composers, performed by pianist Sina Kloke and Polish mezzo-soprano Marta Wryk, brings together works by composers such as Clara Schumann, Ethel Smyth, Rosy Wertheim and Florence Price with the historical contexts in which they lived and worked.

Now in international demand, the programme is expanded at every new venue to include at least one woman composer connected to that particular place. Contemporary women artists, as well as local authors and presenters, are deliberately involved and, wherever possible, introduced to the audience in person.

This format expands the concept of mothers. lovers. revolutionists. – Portraits of Women Composers by adding an intercultural and stylistic dimension. In collaboration with German-Afghan jazz singer and composer Simin Tander, a programme is being developed that brings classical art song into dialogue with jazz, songwriting and global music.

The programme draws on Simin Tander’s album Unfading, which sets texts by women writers from different centuries, including the Afghan poet Sohayla Hasrat-Nazimi.

At the heart of the collaboration between the three internationally active musicians Simin Tander, Marta Wryk and Sina Kloke is the fusion of different musical languages and cultural perspectives. Works by European women composers enter into dialogue with improvisational and transcultural sound worlds.

Classical voice and piano meet vocals rooted in jazz and global music. The result is a distinctive format that makes questions of diversity, equality and intercultural dialogue artistically tangible, while offering new impulses for Cologne’s cultural landscape.

The format is aimed at a diverse audience from the worlds of classical music, jazz and global music. It also seeks to reach new listeners with an interest in intercultural themes, diversity and social issues.

The piano four-hands programme Rhapsody in Pink, created with pianist Ani Ter-Martirosyan, likewise places the work of women composers at its centre. At the same time, it explores how emancipation can succeed as a shared process involving both women and men.

At the heart of the programme are works for piano four hands by important women composers from different eras, including Clara Schumann, Florence Price and Mel Bonis. Each of these works is placed in dialogue with a piece by a male composer, among them Johannes Brahms and George Gershwin.

Through spoken introductions, the evening moves between a variety of musical worlds while also illuminating the biographies of the featured women composers, whose works continue to be confronted with stereotypes to this day.

The programme culminates in a particular dramatic highlight: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue provides a virtuosic and accessible finale, while playfully creating a bridge to the programme’s title and its reference to the stereotypical association between colour and gender.