Pinchgut Opera’s pre-concert podcast, hosted by Genevieve Lang, with guest, Pinchgut Opera Artistic Director, Erin Helyard.

For over three centuries, Venice was home to a special institution unique in music history: the ospedali. These were inaugurated as state-run shelters for poor or homeless children and the ospedali provided the very first formally organised music education for female musicians outside the convent. Between 1585 and 1855 the ospedali employed the very best professional musicians in Europe to educate the women who boarded there, and in the early eighteenth century the Pietà boasted the most famous musician of them all: Antonio Vivaldi.

Join Genevieve and Erin as they explore the little-known history of the women and girls of the Ospedale della Pietà, who were amongst the leading singers and instrumentalists of their time, with the composer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau quoted as saying, "I have not an idea of anything so voluptuous and affecting as this music...."

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A transcendent concert experience awaits you this September with the divine element of the female voice at its heart as Pinchgut Opera presents Women of the Pietà.