I Have Been Her Kind

Elisabeth Hetherington, soprano

Rachael Beesely, violin / Cynthia Freivogel, violin / Iteke Wijbenga, viola / Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde, cello / Artem Belogurov, harpsichord / Margaret Margaret Urquhart, violone

“I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night…”

From Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind”

I Have Been Her Kind is an exploration of the outcast female voice through the ages — women who could not, and would not, conform to the expectations of society. Shamed, shunned, and punished, they were isolated, driven to madness, and misunderstood.

Named after the great American confessional poet Anne Sexton’s iconic Her Kind, this program brings together Sexton’s own voice — heard in a recording of her reading the poem — with music by Handel, Purcell, and Strozzi alongside works by Kaija Saariaho and Karmit Fadael, in a seamless dramatic journey interwoven with electro-acoustic transitions and interludes by Tatiana Rosa.

The Baroque figures of powerful yet misunderstood women — Alcina, Armide and Medea — find their reflections in twentieth- and twenty-first-century explorations of madness, psychological disintegration, and womanhood in works by Plath, Saariaho, Fadael and Rosa.

Soprano Elisabeth Hetherington, praised for her artistry in both Baroque and contemporary repertoires, joins her regular collaborators, ensemble Postscript, whose versatile musicians provide an intensely expressive instrumental landscape to match her probing and spellbinding voice.