Baroque music by female composers remains a repertoire that is rarely encountered on contemporary stages. With DONNE D’AMORE, Burak Özdemir and his ensemble Musica Sequenza present a carefully curated pasticcio program dedicated exclusively to works by women composers of the 16th and 17th centuries—voices that once resonated in courts, convents, and salons across Europe, yet have largely disappeared from today’s concert life.
The program brings together rediscovered music by remarkable yet often overlooked composers such as Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana, Barbara Strozzi, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Isabella Leonarda, and others. Their works reveal a rich spectrum of emotional expression and compositional imagination, offering a striking counter-narrative to the canonical image of early Baroque music. Through this constellation of pieces, DONNE D’AMORE seeks not only to revive forgotten repertoire, but also to illuminate a broader cultural landscape in which women actively shaped musical life as composers, performers, and intellectual figures.
The project emerges from Özdemir’s ongoing artistic inquiry into the role of women in cultural history. His recent opera KASSIA, dedicated to the life and artistic legacy of the Byzantine composer Kassiani of Constantinople, marked the beginning of a deeper exploration into female authorship in music. In DONNE D’AMORE, this research evolves into a concert format that functions both as performance and as an act of historical listening—an attempt to reconnect with artistic perspectives that were long marginalized or erased.
In a contemporary cultural environment that remains, in many respects, structurally male-dominated—visible in the persistent imbalance among conductors, directors, composers, and institutional leadership—returning to these historical voices acquires particular urgency. Listening to the music of these women today invites reflection not only on the past, but also on the ways artistic narratives are shaped, remembered, and transmitted.
Performed by Musica Sequenza on historical instruments of the late Renaissance and early Baroque, DONNE D’AMORE unfolds as a vivid sonic landscape. The ensemble’s historically informed performance practice brings renewed vitality to these works, revealing their expressive immediacy and dramatic intimacy. Rather than presenting them as archival curiosities, the project approaches these compositions as living artistic statements—capable of speaking directly to contemporary audiences.
DONNE D’AMORE thus becomes more than a concert program. It is an invitation to reimagine the early modern musical world through the voices of the women who helped shape it, and to listen anew to a repertoire whose emotional depth and artistic boldness remain strikingly present.
Works by
Jacquet de la Guerre
Lucrezia Vizzana
Bianca Maria Meda
Isabella Leonarda
Barbara Strozzi
Francesca Caccini
Carlotta Ferrari
