Listen to Antonia Bembo

I enjoy listening to J. S. Bach, especially when my soul needs to be organized. But until recently, I’d never heard of Antonia Bembo. If you just want to listen to Antonia Bembo, consider yourself invited to listen to Lamento della Vergine.

Pondering whether to listen to Julian Bream on lute or whether to explore one of the many violin concerto albums available, I realized that what I really needed to do was find out something—anything—about women composers of the Baroque era. As is obvious, I’m not a music expert, but fortunately, expanding your personal canon is easy, unless you get derailed by the endless choices available: Top hits the year I was born vs Chinese opera, anyone? For some of us, this is the kind of problem that could send us straight back to Bach.

Even the comparatively limited vast array of Baroque women composers that are ridiculously less famous than Bach could overwhelm you.

Warning: it totally might.

So Google around, or listen to one musician I found: Bembo.

She is featured on the album Donne Barocche: Woman Composers from the Baroque Period, of which Rick Anderson wrote for the Music Library Association (volume 59, issue 2, page 412): “When the point of a recording is to showcase compositions by women, critical evaluation can be something of a political minefield. … In this case, it may be sufficient to say that the works on offer are every bit as expertly written as one might expect from these musicians' more commonly recorded male contemporaries.”

Enjoy.