top of page
St Judes Martinez 5-4-24 Performance Bill Hiskett-162-f.jpg

Performing the Works of Historic Female Composers

One of Cayenna’s passions is sharing the remarkable music of historic female composers with modern-day audiences. A major motivator is the enthusiastic responses of listeners encountering pieces that inhabit musical sound worlds familiar to them, yet feel new and distinctive—each revealing its own unique compositional voice.

 

Since there are often few or no recordings, each work presents an exciting puzzle. These composers rarely benefited from the revision process of publication, and the type-set scores or manuscripts that do exist frequently contain errors, inconsistencies, and musical challenges—including issues of tempo and orchestration—that require careful, almost forensic investigation.

 

Beyond the technical matters, the process of entering into the musical thought processes of these composers is equally compelling. What musical ideas were they seeking to convey through the notation they have left us?

 

Her aim is to contribute academically informed yet intuitively musical performances to what she hopes will become a growing performance tradition of these composers’ works.

Martines: The Complete Keyboard Works

The first complete recording of the surviving keyboard music of Marianna Martines (1744–1812), a composer, keyboard virtuoso, and cultural force at the heart of eighteenth-century Viennese musical life. ​Led by conductor Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, with pianist Idith Meshulam Korman and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra,, this major interpretative and restorative project brings together Martines’ four surviving keyboard concertos, three sonatas, and Sinfonia in C major, performed on modern instruments from newly prepared critical editions

SIGCD934 Cover_edited.jpg
Over the past decade, this commitment has taken shape through a growing series of performances that bring the music of historic women composers back into the concert hall. In addition to her recording of Marianna Martines’s keyboard concerti and Sinfonia, notable examples have included the US premiere of Ethel Smyth’s Before the Squall for mezzo-soprano and orchestra from Three Moods of the Sea in 2017, from a newly edited score by Amy Chang. Chang’s critical edition of Smyth’s complete works is now to be published by Breitkopf & Härtel. An earlier edition of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto prepared by Chang underpinned the Sheldonian Theatre premiere of the work with pianist Carson Becke and the Oxford University Orchestra.

Collaborating with pianist and musicologist Samantha Ege, Cayenna has given regional premieres of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and Doreen Carwithen’s Concerto for Piano and Strings with the Oxford Chamber Orchestra. She has also conducted a rare performance of Price’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with American violinist Aaliyah Booker, as well as the composer’s Symphony No. 1. And in 2016, in collaboration with pianist Daniel Grimwood, she brought Germaine Tailleferre’s Concerto pour piano et 12 instruments out of the Library of Congress archives, conducting its first performance in a century in the historic Holywell Music Room in Oxford, England.

In France and Italy she has given regional premieres of symphonic works by Louise Farrenc and Emilie Mayer, including Farrenc’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3 and Overture No. 2, and Mayer’s Symphonies Nos. 1 and 4. In 2024, Cayenna toured northern Italy, giving the Italian premiere of Ruth Gipps’s Symphony No. 2 in Cremona and Parma.

Additional works by historic female composers that Cayenna has brought to the stage include Fanny Mendelssohn’s Overture in C; Morfydd Llwyn Owen’s Nocturne; Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches; Ethel Smyth’s Serenade in D and The Boatswain’s Mate: Overture; as well as extracts from Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata, orchestrated for full orchestra, and Amy Beach’s Symphony in E minor.

©2026 by Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey.

bottom of page