Last modified on Mon 8 Mar 2021 10.44 EST
Marking International Womenâs Day in a week-long festival online, the SWAPâra organisation â Supporting Women and Parents in Opera â is celebrating female composers, both past and present, whose music has not been sufficiently known, if at all. Singers from seven different conservatoires appear in the Forgotten Voices series, spotlighting no fewer than 30 composers from Europe and the Americas.
Students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama â coached by mezzo-soprano and SWAP-ra co-founder, Kitty Whately â inaugurated proceedings with a livestreamed concert featuring three Welsh composers and one from Scotland. Morfydd Owen, who had seemed assured of a bright future, was just 26 when she died in 1918 from complications following an appendectomy. All her songs had a light and natural flow, but it was Gweddi y Pechadur (Prayer of the Sinner), a Welsh favourite, which came over most effectively in tenor Rhys Meilyr Jonesâs rendering, the pianoâs darkly chromatic harmony piling on the agony. Grace Williams, a prolific but neglected writer, was represented by two songs that showed her measured command of the medium.