麻豆社

Soprano Nazan Fikret and pianist Rebecca Cohen perform the world premiere of a new piece that explores the emotional impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on women. This Radio 3 International Women鈥檚 Day commission sees a text by poet Jo Brandon set to music by composer Ella Jarman-Pinto.

Ella and Jo write...

We relished the opportunity to work together once again and set about focusing on the impact of the 2020 pandemic on women, and in particular, mothers. Both mothers ourselves, we too had experienced the extra emotional labour, caring and educational responsibilities that, largely, women were taking on during the pandemic. However, we soon realised that as the pandemic had changed life for everyone, we wanted to create something that summed up the huge variety of feeling that the world has all experienced. Hope, fear, exhaustion, anger, despair. There's no "us" and "them": we need to recognise the struggles that we all experience and, where we have the emotional space, work to help those around us how we can.

While drafting different ideas for the poem, Jo stumbled across the concept of sound cures and how church bells had been rung to ward off the plague. That led on to discovering the word 鈥減lango鈥� (Latin), meaning a lament or expression of grief like beating the chest or wailing. From there, the piece morphed into the idea that female expression of all these pent-up emotions and responsibilities could be a sound cure, like those church bells, a way of communally sharing our fears and finding comfort and empowerment in expression, rather than quietly trying to get on and make the best of things.

It felt a fitting way to celebrate International Women鈥檚 Day to write a piece about enabling women to make noise and to be heard. The piece was written especially for the soprano Nazan Fikret and pianist Rebecca Cohen, who premiered the piece on 麻豆社 Radio 3鈥檚 In Tune on 8 March 2021.

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