Muffled Voices Festival

Muffled Voices Festival We are an international celebration of women composers in opera!

06/23/2026

🎭 Cabildo: what is true, and what is fiction?

Did you know that the libretto of Cabildo by Nan Bagby Stephens was partly based on real events? But not everything in this opera is true.

📜 What really happened?
Pierre and Jean Lafitte were real pirates. Pierre really was imprisoned in the Cabildo before the Battle of New Orleans. And yes — the Lafittes really did help the Americans defend the city.

🌟 What often gets romanticized?
The Lafittes were not just adventurous outlaws. They were also part of the brutal world of smuggling and the slave trade. New Orleans society did not fully accept them as their own.

❤️ What was invented?
The love story between Pierre and Lady Valerie is pure fiction. Lady Valerie is an invented character, and a romance like that would have been nearly impossible in real life.

🎶 That is part of what makes opera so powerful: it takes history and turns it into myth.

🔗 Full recording of the opera — https://clck.ru/3UK9WZ

💬 Which fact surprised you the most?

06/19/2026

🎭 In 1997, a woman composer wrote an opera about two women who gave up everything to follow their Decembrist husbands. Not for happiness — for duty.

🎶 Tatiana Chudova (1944–2021) was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and the author of more than 500 works. In 2024, she would have turned 80. The first season of the Muffled Voices Festival was dedicated to her memory and opened with her opera Russian Women.

👶 The most haunting scene is not the penal servitude itself, but a lullaby. Princess Volkonskaya sings to her newborn son before leaving for Siberia — forever. The Tsar’s condition was clear: to follow their husbands into exile, the Decembrists’ wives had to renounce their family, property, and children.

📜 Nekrasov first called his poem Decembrist Women, then changed the title to Russian Women to emphasize a national, rather than social, act of devotion. Chudova’s score brings together Russian tradition and a restrained, intelligent modernism.

🔗 Full opera recording — https://clck.ru/3UFwXF

💭 Have you watched it?

🎭 She wrote an opera about a concentration camp. And no, this is not a student exercise.🏆 Alina Podzorova is a Russian c...
06/16/2026

🎭 She wrote an opera about a concentration camp. And no, this is not a student exercise.

🏆 Alina Podzorova is a Russian composer whose work has already found its way onto serious stages. A recipient of a scholarship from the Valery Gergiev Foundation, she has published music with Muzyka and Kompozitor, and her works have been released by the Melodiya label.

🔥 What matters to us, though, is not just her résumé.

⚡️ Alina is a composer who does not stay within one genre. She works across opera and dance, takes part in world premieres, and is not afraid of difficult subjects.

🎶 At the Muffled Voices Festival, we presented her opera The Periodic System — a parable about a man on the edge of life and death in a concentration camp.

🖤 Restrained. Terrifying. Honest.

🔊 Alina Podzorova is one of the voices we believe should be heard more widely.

💬 Which genre do you think speaks most powerfully about trauma — opera, theater, or film?

👑 The Venetian Who Wrote an Opera for the Sun KingAntonia Bembo did the unthinkable in seventeenth-century Venice. She l...
06/08/2026

👑 The Venetian Who Wrote an Opera for the Sun King

Antonia Bembo did the unthinkable in seventeenth-century Venice. She left her husband, gave up her home and social status, and fled to France.

For music.

🎭 Opera as Diplomacy

In Paris, she dedicated her work to Louis XIV. And the King himself — famously hard to impress — granted this foreign woman a personal pension.

A woman. A composer. A fugitive.

In 1707, at over sixty, she completed Hercules in Love — a monumental work that would not be heard in her lifetime.

✨ The Return

In 2023 — 316 years later — the work was finally heard. Recordings appeared. Musicologists marveled at her unique blend of Italian vocal virtuosity and French elegance.

❤️ Why She Matters

Antonia Bembo is not an exception. She is one of hundreds of composers whose names were erased from textbooks while their music waited in silence.

🙏 Her story reminds us: genius has no gender. And the right to create cannot be taken away — even if it takes centuries for a voice to be heard again.

📖 What to Read About Women ComposersWe often talk about music and composers. Today, we want to share a few books and tex...
06/04/2026

📖 What to Read About Women Composers

We often talk about music and composers. Today, we want to share a few books and texts for those who want to go deeper.

🎶 The Composer, Herself (2024)

A collection of 27 essays by composers from around the world on how music is actually made. No middlemen, no clichés — just their own voices. Among them is Missy Mazzoli, whose opera we presented at our festival.

🎶 The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers (2024)

Academic, but full of life. From the Middle Ages to the present day, this book moves beyond the myth of «female invisibility» and looks instead at how women composers created, built careers, gained recognition, and shaped musical history.

🎶 Women Composers in the USSR: From Yulia Weisberg to Sofia Gubaidulina (article, 2022)

An article by Alexandra Kopylova about composers whose names too often remained in the shadows: Yulia Weisberg, Galina Ustvolskaya, Vissarion Shebalin’s contemporaries, such as Lyadova, Aleksandra Pakhmutova, Sofia Gubaidulina, and others. A chance to look again at a part of our own musical history.

👉 Have you read any of these? What books on composers would you recommend?

🎭 Orpheus and Eurydice. But backwards.Anne LeBaron rewrote the greatest myth. Eurydice chose to stay in hell. 🎷 "Blue Ca...
05/28/2026

🎭 Orpheus and Eurydice. But backwards.

Anne LeBaron rewrote the greatest myth. Eurydice chose to stay in hell.

🎷 "Blue Calls Set You Free" — World stage premiere at the "Muffled Voices" festival.

❓ How it came to be?

Anne LeBaron — American composer, Fulbright scholar. Studied with Ligeti and Kagel. Guggenheim grants, Alpert Award. Teaches at CalArts.

In 1989, she wrote a jazz opera — 50 minutes for 7 soloists, choir, jazz ensemble, and electronics.

📖 The story — the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. But not the one you know.

❓ What did LeBaron change?

Everything moves to the Mississippi Delta. The underworld is a jazz club. Eurydice is a singer who wants independence.

In the classic version, Orpheus looks back and loses her forever.

💀 In LeBaron's version, it's different. Eurydice herself decides to stay. Because down there, she has her voice. Freedom. The blues.

❓ Why does it matter?

It's a myth about a woman choosing creativity over love. Art over returning home. And she doesn't lose in the end.

💭 You can read the full story of how this opera was made at the link. And you — would you stay in an underground jazz club forever if you could sing there?

🔗 Check the link in our YouTube channel description.

🎭 A voice we made louder. Continuing our series.❤️ Today — Tatiana Chudova (1944–2021)Composer, professor at the Mosco...
05/25/2026

🎭 A voice we made louder. Continuing our series.

❤️ Today — Tatiana Chudova (1944–2021)

Composer, professor at the Moscow Conservatory, Honored Artist of Russia. Author of over 500 works.

✨ Why is she part of "Muffled Voices"?

The first season of our festival was dedicated to her memory. For a reason.

She wasn't afraid of experiments. 🔥

At the festival, we presented four of her operas. Completely different, two of which were:

📝 "Von Meck — Tchaikovsky" — an epistolary opera based on real letters. But here's the twist: each character has two voices. One says what they write. The other says what they actually think. Tchaikovsky is sung by a tenor and a bass. Von Meck — by a soprano and a mezzo.

🧠 "Professor Dowell's Head" — a mono-opera about a head on a glass table. Pain. Humiliation. Bass-baritone and piano. Pure tension.

Chudova didn't complicate things for the sake of it. She just showed the truth — even if that took two voices or a living head.

What matters: She worked in every genre. Ballets, symphonies, choral music. She studied Russian folklore. And she did it alongside men — in spaces where women were rarely seen.

💬 Have you heard Tatiana Chudova's music? If yes — which piece stuck with you? If not — which opera grabs you more: "Von Meck — Tchaikovsky" or "Professor Dowell's Head"?

🎼 The Composer Who Conducted a RevolutionAt seventeen, Ethel Smyth fought her father for the right to study music. She w...
05/13/2026

🎼 The Composer Who Conducted a Revolution

At seventeen, Ethel Smyth fought her father for the right to study music. She won. She went to Leipzig, studied with Herzogenberg, and met Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Clara Schumann.

But she did not stop there.

🗣️ A Voice of an Era

She became the first woman composer to be made a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Her March of the Women became the anthem of the suffrage movement. Her opera The Wreckers is considered one of the most important English operas between Purcell and Britten. And Der Wald — for nearly a century — was the only opera by a woman ever staged at the Metropolitan Opera.

🎶 The Conductor with a Toothbrush

In 1912, Smyth was arrested for breaking a window during a protest. In Holloway Prison, she did not give up. She conducted the inmates’ choir with a toothbrush.

When the conductor Thomas Beecham visited, she waved it at him from her cell window.

❤️ Ethel Smyth proved that music can be more than art: it can be a weapon, a manifesto, a life lived in resistance.

🎭 Continuing our series❤️ Today — Anna Kuzmina.Anna Kuzmina is a St. Petersburg-based composer, conductor, and teacher...
05/08/2026

🎭 Continuing our series

❤️ Today — Anna Kuzmina.

Anna Kuzmina is a St. Petersburg-based composer, conductor, and teacher. She graduated with honors from the Rimsky-Korsakov Music College in choral conducting, and later with honors from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in composition. Since 2018, she has taught composition at the Conservatory’s School-Studio. She is also a member of the Union of Composers of St. Petersburg.

🏆 Her work has received numerous awards, including First Prize at the All-Russian Dmitri Shostakovich Competition for Composers, the Prokhorovskoye Pole Prize, and multiple prizes at the Choral Laboratory XXI Century competition, where she won first, second, and third prizes in different years. She has also been recognized at the Three Centuries of the Classical Romance competition, the STAM Festival, and festivals such as From the Avant-Garde to the Present Day, Russian Spring in St. Petersburg, Playing with Classics, and the Ballet Incubator project.

🌍 Her music is performed both in Russia and abroad.

At the Muffled Voices Festival, we presented Anna’s opera Dreams and Not Dreams — a 20-minute work for soprano, choir, and orchestra based on poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. The premiere took place at the Hermitage Theatre in July 2024, performed by Bolshoi Theatre leading soloist Polina Shabunina.

🔥 Anna Kuzmina is one of the voices we want to make louder.

💬 Are you familiar with her music?

🎭 Chamber opera is not a “reduced” version of grand operaIt’s a misconception that comes up often.Chamber opera is often...
05/05/2026

🎭 Chamber opera is not a “reduced” version of grand opera

It’s a misconception that comes up often.

Chamber opera is often perceived as something “lighter”: fewer musicians, shorter, simpler — as if it were just a condensed version of a large-scale work.

But that’s not true. Chamber opera is a distinct genre. It is not “compressed” from grand opera — it is conceived that way from the beginning.

Yes, the scale is smaller: a reduced orchestra, 1–4 characters. But the difference is not in scale — it’s in distance.

✨ Chamber opera happens closer to the audience

Without the distance of a large hall, without the feeling of watching something from afar. That’s why it can speak more directly, more sharply, more honestly.

There are no mass scenes or three-act structures. But chamber opera is not about duration ⏳ — it’s about the way the story and music exist. Sometimes, chamber opera can say more than grand opera.

💭 What do you connect with more — scale or closeness?

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