Donne, Women in Music sets new world record
A new Guinness World Record for Longest Acoustic Music Live-Streamed Concert highlights the need for greater diversity and access.
A new Guinness World Record for Longest Acoustic Music Live-Streamed Concert highlights the need for greater diversity and access.
The record for the longest live-streamed concert is set to be broken with music by female and non-binary artists.
Surveying 111 orchestras across 31 countries, including Australia, the report found that only 7.7 percent of works programmed in 2021–2022 were by women composers.
The new study by the Donne – Women in Music foundation, analysing the music played by 100 orchestras from 27 countries during the 2020-21 season, highlights the lack of representation.
In the 2019-2020 seasons of 15 of the world’s top orchestras, only 3.6 percent of music was written by women, according to soprano Gabriella Di Laccio's DONNE, Women in Music project.
Following her damning analysis of world-leading orchestras’ 2018-2019 seasons, we spoke to the soprano and driving force behind the Donne: Women in Music project.
Gabriella Di Laccio’s debut recital disc is a frustrating one. The Brazilian coloratura soprano’s technique is solid, it’s an attractive voice, and she has a feel for the Italian language. That said, this recording of just six arias is neither musicologically adventurous nor deeply interpreted. A celebrated baroque specialist in her home country, she never disappoints technically, but the result is short of noteworthy. Her strongest performance is the album’s opener, Vivaldi’s barnstorming Armatae face, et anguibus. Di Laccio meets the demands of the aria with ease, Vagaus’ call to arms appropriately ferocious. The same can’t be said of the second track, the regularly programmed Agitata da due venti from the same composer. It’s a reading curiously devoid of emotion, Constanza’s inner turmoil only superficially telegraphed in puzzling emphases of text. While the B section picks up a bit, there simply isn’t much agitata in Di Laccio’s reading. Rounding out the album’s Vivaldi offering is the tempestuous Siam navi all’onde algenti, another showcase for her formidable technique – yet it suffers from the same lack of dramatic insight. This problem is particularly evident when we get to the set of Handel arias, some of the repertoire’s most musty gems. Lascia…