Music and words written by women and performed by award-winning female singers will take center stage at the 4th annual International Women’s Day Concert coming up in Oak Park.
The annual event will take place at 7:30 p.m. March 8 at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, 611 Randolph St.
The concert was conceived by Oak Park resident Christine Steyer, founder and Artistic Director of Bellissima Opera, and is an initiative of the nonprofit Working in Concert.
“I wanted to highlight an all-female experience to give opportunities for women to sing music by women,” Steyer said. “We’ve also had, over the years, female poets read works. We also have a female artist whose images serve as a backdrop to the event.”
Originally, works by men were also included ,but this year “every work is either by a female composer, lyricist, or both, and there’s an all-female cast,” Steyer said. She chooses the performers but allows them to select the songs they wish to sing.
Singers this year are Anna Caldwell, Kelci Kosin, Jules Furgal, and Steyer.
The works span four centuries, with the oldest piece being by a Renaissance composer. “We’ve got a lot of variety of styles of text and music,” Steyer said.
The concert includes music by Amy Beach, Florence Price, Elizabeth Doyle, Marjorie Rusche and Ella Fitzgerald, plus words from Colette, Sappho, and other women. The featured visual artist this year is Emily Nelson Taylor.
Claudia Hommel, executive director of Working in Concert, will be the emcee. “Usually, I’m in the background as a producer for these concerts,” Hommel said. “This time I’m going to take the party on and I will move the show along.”
Hommel believes the International Women’s Day concerts serve an important function.
“There’s so many ways in which we’re looking to amplify women’s voices,” she said. “We’re being pushed back all the time. We have to keep chugging forward. There’s a lot of women’s stories out there that need to be told.”
In terms of concert highlights, Hommel said, “I’m very taken with Ava Logan and Elizabeth Doyle bringing in an excerpt from their ‘Bricktop’ show because I’m a huge Bricktop fan. In fact, I introduced to Ava the song that was Bricktop’s signature song ‘Insufficient Sweetie.’”
Doyle and Logan premiered the piece on Bricktop last year at the Cole Porter Festival. They will sing it together with Doyle accompanying them on the piano.
“Bricktop was an African American singer and club manager and owner that was very popular in Paris in the ‘20s and ‘30s,” Doyle related. “Cole Porter was one of her big backers. He had a table reserved for him if he’d come in.”
Doyle said the original show has an interesting section between Cole Porter and Bricktop. “For more general audiences, we’re expanding it a little bit to include things that she did not write,” Doyle said. She added that audiences at the concert will learn “there was a very vibrant black community of musicians in Paris between the wars and Bricktop’s clubs were important meeting places for all sorts of artists and people that were interested in culture.”
This is the third time that Doyle has participated in the annual concert. “Three years ago, they commissioned me to do a four-female-voice piece on gun violence,” she said. “Last year, they tasked me with doing a four-voice arrangement of Amanda McBroom’s ‘The Rose.’”
This year’s concert will also feature one of Doyle’s art songs with a French text sung by Christine Steyer.
Steyer praised the venue’s outstanding acoustics and piano. She noted that there’s free street parking at the venue.
There will be a reception with light refreshments after the concert.
A high-quality recording of the show will be posted online following the concert.
Tickets are $30 for general admission by March 2; $40 starting March 3 or at the door; $60 for VIP reserved seating, and $10 for youth under 24 and students with IDs. Reservations are at bellissimaopera.com.
Myrna Petlicki is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
