In March 2020, Mirinesse had prepared a concert to be sung in the early weeks of the month. Before we could stage the concert, however, the world changed. We moved into quarantine, and in the few confusing weeks that followed, we thought we’d be able to reschedule.
That concert never got rescheduled, and it wasn’t until 2022 that we were able to gather together again as musicians. Our March 2022 concert was a triumph, featuring Andrea Ramsey’s Suffrage Cantata, a piece made more poignant by the fight over Roe v. Wade that had been making its way through the Supreme Court. That piece felt urgent and necessary, and I wanted our current season to have some of the same urgency.
Much has been lost in the past three years, both from Covid and also from a political moment where rights once considered sacred have been eroded. It was in this space that I found myself in the dark, sitting by a lake, and thinking about what I wanted our program to say. I wanted to help find light in the darkness, to honor the traditions of strong, female divinity, and to issue a call to action to our singers and our audience, to use this moment to be thoughtful, but also to act on behalf of one another. I began to assemble a program in my mind, starting with music that we had learned and polished, but never performed. From those pieces, a theme of light emerged.
In this light, we also learned just how much we had missed making music together. The works that we are singing this season honor the importance of community and allow us once again to take joy in creation. For us, the opportunity to sing together once a week is all the more cherished for having lost it for so long. It is our hope that our audience too will feel the specialness of sharing in art as they let this music wash over them.
- Rebecca Rottsolk, Mirinesse Artistic Director