Raphaela Gromes - Femmes

Raphaela Gromes, Julian Riem, Festival Strings Lucerne, Daniel Dodds

For many years, star cellist and OPUS KLASSIK award winner Raphaela Gromes has championed works by women composers. Three of her albums, which have been highly praised by the press and the public, have featured music by unknown female composers, and she has a long-standing collaboration with the "Frau und Musik" archive in Frankfurt. So it is only logical that Raphaela Gromes gives a voice to outstanding women of music history from nine centuries with her new double album FEMMES. No less than 23 female composers are represented on the double album: from Hildegard von Bingen and Clara Schumann to Lera Auerbach and Billie Eilish, but also famous opera figures such as Mozart's Susanna from "Le nozze di Figaro" or Bizet's Carmen. "What have we missed out on all these decades of wonderful music in a culture that to this day largely ignores compositions by women?" asks author Susanne Wosnitzka in the accompanying booklet text. Because in the program of German professional orchestras still less than 2% of the works come from women composers and the foundation "Donne-Frauen in der Musik" comes in a survey of 111 orchestras in 31 countries to a share of only 7, 7%. A strange picture, because for centuries there have been extremely talented women composers who have left behind a multitude of exciting works. "Inspired by a friend's idea to dedicate an album to only female composers, I plunged into the research and was thrilled and shocked at the same time," says Raphaela Gromes. "Thrilled by the incredible number of brilliant female composers who have existed throughout the world since the Middle Ages, shocked because I had never heard of most of them." In close cooperation with the archive "Woman and Music", the "Furore Verlag" - a publishing house that only publishes works by female composers, and Sony Classical, the concept for FEMMES was born and it immediately became a double album. It contains works by 23 female composers from all over the world, with well-known names such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel or Nadia and Lili Boulanger, and real discoveries with music by Princess Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Bavaria, the Dutch-Jewish composer Henriette Bosmans, the Swedish composer Laura Netzel, the African-American composers Dolores White and Florence Price or the contemporary composer Victoria Yagling. Some world premiere recordings can also be heard on FEMMES, such as the "Tre Momenti" for cello and string orchestra by the Italian composer Matilde Capuis. Raphaela Gromes is accompanied on FEMMES by the Festival Strings Lucerne Orchestra and its artistic director Daniel Dodds, with whom she has a long-standing collaboration, as well as by pianist Julian Riem, who also wrote all the arrangements on the album. "With FEMMES, I can finally make the works and life stories of these wonderful women accessible to a wide audience," says Raphaela Gromes about her new album, released by Sony Classical.

Price: $45.98

In stock
ships in 3 to 5 days