Musica Angelica Salutes Female Composer

As the period-instrument movement burrows ever more deeply into cobwebbed corners of musicology, Musica Angelica has launched a series on a once-neglected species: women composers.

For a start, they patched together an evening of music at Pasadena’s All Saints Church Friday night around a fascinating Venetian figure, Barbara Strozzi (1619-c.1664).

The New Grove’s Dictionary tells us that Strozzi, the adopted daughter of poet-librettist Giulio Strozzi, was the leading singer at her father’s Accademia degli Unisoni, where apparently her deportment brought her some “notoriety.” (Grove’s does not elaborate, alas.) And this sampling from Strozzi’s collections of cantatas and arias revealed an often startling musical talent.

Strozzi’s music has personality, filled with unpredictable harmonic changes, unusual structures and delicious passages, like the way the two voices tumble around and spiral upward in thirds in “Merce di voi,” luminously sung by sopranos Susan Judy and Samela Aird Beasom. Strozzi was capable of emotional depth--as in the mournful cantata “Lagrime mie”--but she also had a somewhat wicked wit, setting a cynical poem whose translated title read, “Woman Knows Not What She Says, and Does Not Say What She Knows.” And even at its least inspired, Strozzi’s music was more interesting than the program’s sole entry by her famous teacher, Francesco Cavalli, the rather tedious “The Farewell of Aeneas.”

The evening was supposed to have been an all-female affair, pairing Strozzi with excerpts from Francesca Caccini’s opera, “La liberazione di Ruggiero.” Instead, Strozzi was threaded in and out of a series of instrumental pieces by the decidedly male 16th and 17th century Italians Galilei, Frescobaldi, Lorenzini and Piccinini. Throughout, Musica Angelica’s singers and instrumentalists performed handsomely and delectably, achieving qualities of emotional expression that are pumping new life into the early music scene.