My Letter to the World / That Never Wrote to Me (Women Poets in Song)

Soprano Georgie Malcolm and pianist Paul St-Georges perform a recital tracing the poetic voices of women in song, from Schubert to today Date: Tuesday 20 October Doors: 18:30 Performance: 19:00 (running time approx. 2 hours) Venue: St James' Church, Prebend Street, London N1 8PH Tickets: • Early bird: £15 (£10 concessions) • From 1 October: £20 (£15 concessions) • Concessions: students, under-26s, unemployed, seniors • Price includes a glass of wine Soprano Georgie Malcolm and pianist Paul St-Georges present a recital exploring the poetic voices of women in song, from Schubert to the present day. Recently the song world has seen a welcome push to programme and champion female composers. But art song is a synthesis of music and poetry, so what of the poetic voices of women within it? Richard Strauss, a self-professed lover of the female voice, set countless shimmering songs for soprano, yet never once set a text by a woman. Neither did Mahler, nor Debussy. Even Schubert's beloved Suleika I, long published under Goethe's name, was in fact written by his lover, Marianne von Willemer, and the misattribution stood for decades. Across his hundreds of songs, only a handful of texts were actually written by women. This programme sets out simply to redress that balance, tracing the female poetic voice in song across two centuries. Alongside Schubert, Mozart, Cecilia McDowall and Jonathan Dove, it features Copland's existentially intense yet strikingly childlish settings of Emily Dickinson, Prokofiev's chilly, atmospheric Anna Akhmatova songs performed in full, and Poulenc's witty Métamorphoses, written to poems by his friend and muse Louise de Vilmorin. With themes of nature, motherhood, and loves found and lost, these are women in their own words, sympathetically set by men and women alike: a far cry from Frauenliebe und leben. About the performers Georgie Malcolm and Paul St-Georges met as postgraduates at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, bonding over their slightly delayed conversions to the musician's life and a shared love of French song repertoire. Over the past year they have taken part together in the Udo Reinemann Masterclasses in Brussels, working with artists including Anne Sofie von Otter, Roger Vignoles and Gerold Huber. Georgie is a Samling Artist and a former member of both the Wigmore Hall French Song Exchange and the Leeds Lieder Young Artist Programme. Paul is a Britten-Pears Artist who attended the Franz Schubert Institut in 2025.