Women’s Works: Minor Achievement : Soprano Phillips-Thornburgh Hears Arrested Development in the Program by Harmonia Baroque

Imagine Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII and mother of Queen Elizabeth I, in the Tower of England, awaiting her beheading.

That is what soprano Maurita Phillips-Thornburgh thinks of when she sings “O deathe, rock me asleepe” (1536), a song attributed to Boleyn and one of a dozen works composed by “Women of the Baroque” to be performed on a program by that title Sunday in Newport Beach.

“The poetry ruminates about how the pleasures of her life are coming to an end, how it’s a situation for which there is no remedy,” said Phillips-Thornburgh, who will sing with the Harmonia Baroque Players at Christ Church by the Sea United Methodist. “She says, ‘For now I die’ at least six times at the end of each stanza, and references to death are otherwise sprinkled throughout the text.

“You can picture her captors coming to get her. You feel the sense of foreboding, the inescapable, the surety. It’s hypnotic--so transparent, so relentless and so compelling.”

The rest of the works on the program, Phillips-Thornburgh said, are charming, pleasant and enjoyable.

Among them: a suite for harpsichord by Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, who was declared a prodigy by Louis XIV and subsequently educated under the supervision of his mistress; a recorder sonata by Princess Anna Amalia von Preussen, youngest sister of Frederick the Great; a motet for soprano, recorder, violin and continuo by Isabella Leonarda, a nun who by the age of 80 had produced 20 volumes of music, and arias by Camilla de Rossi and Maria Margharita Grimani, Northern Italians about whom almost nothing is known except that they weren’t nuns.

The Harmonia Baroque Players include founder Marika Frankl, recorders; Jennifer Wildeson, violin; Gregory Adamson, cello, and Barbara King, harpsichord.

Phillips-Thornburgh is founder and artistic director of the Santa Monica-based vocal group Cantori Domino and has served as soprano soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under such conductors as Sir George Solti, Zubin Mehta and Eugene Ormandy and with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Gerard Schwartz.

According to Phillips-Thornburgh, known to almost everyone as Bunny, the Leonarda motet “Quam dulcis es” (1687), with its variety of musical forms and daring metrical and melodic devices, is the most developmentally sophisticated of the compositions; “O deathe . . .” the most harmonically sophisticated.

“There is a constant shift (in ‘O deathe . . . ‘ ) from B-natural to B-flat, sometimes in the same measure,” she said. “It’s such a close interval. If the hall is resonant, you hear (the two tones) at the same time, which is how they would have been heard in the Tower of London. It’s definitely about pain and the difference between finally being minor or major. Given the inevitability of Boleyn’s fate, it finally ends up minor.”

A fate, one might hope, not to be shared by other female composers of the Baroque. But Phillips-Thornburgh’s assessment of the quality of these works doesn’t auger well for them.

“You certainly sense the ability and poetry and lyricism of these composers,” she said. “But you sense even stronger an attempt, artistically and intellectually, to bind their feet. Developmentally there is not the interest--none of the pieces we will perform show the developmental progress, even within the piece, of the (period’s) most naive male composers.

“I feel a certain sadness for these women. They clearly were given artistic and musical training--to a point. They may have been an adornment to a court or church, but not (because) they genuinely had comparable intellect or ability or soul of their male counterparts.

“It’s clear, however, that they understood the syntax,” she said. “(Perhaps) if they were writing today in what appears to be a freer, more nourishing ambience . . . .”

* The Harmonia Baroque Players present works by “Women of the Baroque,” Sunday at 7 p.m. at Christ Church by the Sea United Methodist, 1400 W. Balboa Blvd., Newport Beach. Tickets, $10. Seniors and students, $7. Phone (714) 970-8545 or (714) 673-3805.