APPLETON, WIS. — The Lawrence Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Becker, premieres La Serenissima, a composition by Joanne Metcalf, Lawrence University assistant professor of music, at 8:00 p.m. January 27 in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. Metcalf will give a pre-concert lecture at 7:00 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel. Both the concert and lecture are free and open to the public.
The concert features solos by Lawrence Conservatory of Music faculty members Patrice Michaels, associate professor of music, Steven Paul Spears, assistant professor of music, and John Gates, visiting assistant professor of music.
La Serenissima was composed by Metcalf while on sabbatical last year as a composition fellow at the MacDowell Colony. The composition is an extended scene from the opera Orphans of the Heavenly City, an opera on the extraordinary phenomenon of the all-female professional orchestra and choir of the 18th century Venetian Ospedale della Pietá. The Pietá was one of four ospedali, or social welfare institutions, that functioned as places of refuge for the sick, the abandoned, the unwanted, and the socially undesirable. The Pietá’s clientele consisted entirely of abandoned infants who, if they were female and musically gifted, would be given 10 years of musical training and might spend the entirety of their lives in the coro. These women would neither marry nor take formal religious vows, but acted as servants of liturgical music, performing in services and liturgical concerts daily.
In this scene, the soprano sings the role of La Serenissima, or Venice personified, who watches the foundlings as they are admitted to the Pietá through the scaffetta, a small opening discreetly place on the side of the building. She sings from the libro di scaffetta, an intake ledger that lists the barest facts of the infants’ young lives including apparent age, state of health, clothing worn, and identifying tokens left by the mother. Her music resembles a gentle lullaby, but it is surrounded by fateful, dissonant, crashing chords that allude to the harsh destiny those children would have met on the streets of Venice. The men, each in his time a Doge of Venice (the Republic’s highest leader) and member of the Board of Governors of the Pietá, sing the words of a papal bull of 1548 that are inscribed on a lapide, or stone tablet, that remains on the outer wall of the Pietá today.
Metcalf’s compositions have been performed and broadcast in more than 25 countries worldwide and she has received commissions from the Hilliard Ensemble, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Scottish Arts Council, Cappella Nova, the Netherland-America Foundation, Ensemble Hex, English tenor John Potter, Norway’s Trio Mediaeval, and many more. Her composition Il nome del bel fior has received over 85 performances worldwide and was featured in the 2002 German television documentary Wenn Engel singen: Das Hilliard Ensemble; its recording won the 2005 German Echo-klassik prize, the German equivalent of a Grammy, for Best Vocal Ensemble Performance. Metclaf’s works are recorded on ECM New Series and Oehms Classics labels.
