The music on this album grew from the idea for a new song cycle in which women - so often silent in history and mythology – were to speak for themselves and in which all material would be created and performed by women. The Ragazze Quartet found a true kindred spirit in soprano Katharine Dain. A remarkable group of female composers and librettists also joined the project entitled “They Have Waited Long Enough”, each contributing in their own unique and personal way. The result is a rich and diverse collage of songs by Aftab Darvishi, Annelies van Parys, Calliope Tsoupaki, Aida Shirazi and Saskia Venegas Aernouts. What unites them is the urgency that resonates throughout: it is important - if not essential - that these stories are recorded and heard.

Forget This Night explores impermanence and desire through songs by Lili Boulanger, Karol Szymanowski, and Grażyna Bacewicz. The heart of the program is Clairières dans le ciel, Lili Boulanger’s only song cycle and an overlooked masterpiece of the genre, which maps the interior emotional landscape of someone deeply in love—from blissful awe to the devastation of abandonment. The cycle is framed by songs of Szymanowski (a contemporary of Boulanger who was also writing music of simmering passion across the continent against the backdrop of the First World War) and Bacewicz, of a generation later, who treats the same themes in songs of fresh directness and aching lyricism.

To anyone who plays chamber music of any sort, Schubert’s music is a wonderful world to enter. It lifts our spirit to a dreamlike state of awe that is quite unique, with it sweeping long lines and pure poetry. The masterpieces on this cd were ‘stolen’ from Schubert’s original instrumentation. Start with the Arpeggione sonata, originally written for the ‘Arpeggione’, a bowed instrument with six strings and frets, tuned like a guitar but played like a gamba.