Muffled Voices Festival, Washington D.C., DC (2026)

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.

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"?

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.

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?

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?

05/01/2026

An opera where the main character is… a head.

Sounds like horror. But it’s a drama.

🎭 «Professor Dowell’s Head» by Tatiana Chudova - a mono mini-opera for bass-baritone and piano. Written in 2015, based on Alexander Belyaev’s sci-fi horror novel (1925).

❓What is it about? Professor Dowell dies under mysterious circumstances. A young surgeon, Kern, brings his head back to life and keeps it in a laboratory, forcing it to work for him.

On stage — a head on a glass table, connected to tubes. And a voice telling its own story. Pain, humiliation, the final moments before death. Chudova doesn’t overcomplicate. One voice. One piano. Pure tension.

❓Who was Tatiana Chudova? A composer, professor at the Moscow Conservatory, and 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.

💭 Have you seen this opera? What stayed with you?

If not, would you want to experience it live?

04/27/2026

🎭 We often talk about our productions and projects.

About premieres, artists, composers, and the venues where these performances take place. But the most important part happens before the curtain rises.

🎶 Rehearsals.

This is where opera is born again. Where musicians hear the full score come alive for the first time, where a stage director says, “Let’s do it again — but differently", where a performer finds that one exact intonation that gives the whole team goosebumps.

✨ In chamber opera, the rehearsal process is especially delicate. The cast is small, the staging is minimal, and everything depends on breath, timing, and the connection between the people on stage. There is nowhere to hide behind a crowd scene or a full orchestra. Every note, every gesture, is exposed.

❤️ It is here, in the quiet of the rehearsal room, that the magic begins — the magic the audience will later see on stage. These are the moments when an accidental “that didn’t work” suddenly becomes “wow, let’s keep that".

Rehearsals are what remain behind the scenes. But without them, there is no performance.

👉 Have you ever wondered what happens before a premiere? Would you like to step inside a rehearsal?

04/21/2026

🏛️ “Opera risks becoming a museum"

A new interview with Yulia Petrachuk, producer and artistic director of Lyrica Classic and the Muffled Voices Festival, has been published in The Fog Magazine.

🎭 In the interview, she speaks about how the festival was conceived in the U.S. while its first season unexpectedly took place in Russia; about the Maryland presentation of Baruch’s Silence — an opera about the Holocaust, inherited trauma, and forgiveness; and about why contemporary opera still struggles to reach the stage even when strong new repertoire already exists.

As Yulia says in the interview:
“Look at theater repertoires — the same works for a hundred years. Opera risks becoming a museum. There is enough new repertoire. What is missing is not the music, but the willingness of theaters to take responsibility for something new".

✨ Muffled Voices is a practical response to that reality: finding scores, building teams, and bringing works to the stage so contemporary opera can live, travel, and be heard.

👉 Read the full interview: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/opera-should-become-museum-how-muffled-voices-eirzf

💬 What speaks to you more — classic opera, or new work that reflects the world we live in today?

04/19/2026

🎭 Dreams and Not Dreams by Anna Kuzmina — a 20-minute opera built on Marina Tsvetaeva, where dream and reality fuse into one emotional landscape.

Six movements. Six doors: destiny, lullaby, emptiness, fear, release, eternity.

Opera isn’t something you «solve». It’s something you feel.

💬 Which door would you choose tonight — 1–6 (or the emoji) — and why?

04/14/2026

🎭✨ Usually, we post about performances, artists, and dates. But today, it’s about why we started all of this.

💡 The Muffled Voices Festival began with one simple observation — and it sparked a much bigger conversation.

🎶 Producer and soprano Yulia Petrachuk recalls:
«For 20 years I’ve been singing contemporary music — festivals, premieres, new scores. And before I launched the festival in 2024, only once did I receive a work by a woman composer as actual performance material: a handwritten score brought to me by my conservatory solfège teacher, Irina Vorontsova. I was thrilled — and I didn’t think in terms of ‘woman’ or ‘man’. To me, it was simply new music, and I was its discoverer».

🤔 That handwritten score stayed in memory — and years later became a question: why do women’s voices in music so rarely make it to the stage?

🚪 Not because the music doesn’t exist, but because for too long it wasn’t searched for, programmed, produced, and it remained «out of sight».

So a simple idea was born: to create a festival where this music can be heard — professionally, boldly, on a real stage.

🎤 This isn’t about slogans. It’s about repertoire. About fairness to talent. About bringing into the spotlight what has been muted for years.

🌍✨ We keep going: new seasons, new names, new discoveries.

Do you follow Muffled Voices? Whose voice would you most want to hear next — a woman composer from the past, or a contemporary composer?

Muffled Voices Festival

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