Sing Like a Girl

Friday, May 19 - 7:00 PM
Saturday, May 20 - 2:00 PM
Sunday, May 21 - 2:00 PM

Lyric Opera Michael and Ginger Frost Production Arts Building (712 E 18th St)

Sing “Like a Girl” will explore (with some seriousness and some tongue-in-cheek) the expectations imposed on women for hundreds of years and how we have navigated through time, adapted, and learned to lead, heal and rise. All songs on the program are composed by women, while singing the spoken and written words of women.

Featuring “Lifting As We Climb” by Joan Szymko, a 3-movement work commissioned by GALA Choruses in 2020 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Ratification of the 19th Amendment. All lyrics come from speeches and poems by suffragettes such as Ellen Hagan, Sarah Grimke, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Carrie Catt, Anna Julia Cooper, Lucy Stone, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida B. Wells, Alice Paul and Mary Church Terrell.

Hildegard Motets 1. “O Choruscans lux stellarum”, 2. “O Virtus Sapientie”, 4. “Nunc Gaudeant”
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was the first identifiable female composer of Western Music in history, and the most recorded monophonic composer of the high Middle Ages. She was also a German Benedictine Abbess, Mystic and Visionary.

“Now I Become Myself” by Gwyneth Walker, sung to the words of May Sarton (1912-1995). Sarton was a Belgian-American poet and memoirist. She resisted the title of “lesbian writer”, preferring to convey the universality of human love. Her poem likens growing into oneself like a plant, going through uncertainty and fear and her gift as a writer strengthening her character and confidence, and feeling firmly rooted by love.