Recorded at St. Stephen’s Church, Belvedere, California, USA, 15–28 August 2021
Produced and recorded by Matt Carr
24bit 96kHz high resolution recording, editing and mastering
Piano: Steinway Model D, Hamburg, D-274, serial #1400 (Pro Piano, San Francisco)
Available now on iTunes and Spotify
The Future is Female is a project I started in 2018, to celebrate and highlight women composers from the 17th century to the present day. For decades I had been working with many living American composers, including Pauline Oliveros, Tania León, Eve Beglarian, Mary D. Watkins, Julia Wolfe, Ursula Mamlok, Meredith Monk, Annea Lockwood, and many more, but felt an urgent need to explore neglected composers from the past, and from around the globe. Like most pianists, I grew up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of colour. It is still standard practice to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female, then, aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed and heard. At some point I would love to record Kaprálová’s complete April Preludes and Kashperova’s Au sein de la nature, but my main objective in this project is to be inclusive rather than exhaustive. This first of a three-album project is loosely based on the theme of nature. -Sarah Cahill
Track List
Anna BON (1739/40– after 1767)
Keyboard Sonata in B minor, Op. 2, No. 5 (1757) 3 [13:12]
1 I. Allegro moderato [4:44]
2 II. Adagio non molto [4:30]
3 III. Allegro [3:57]
Fanny MENDELSSOHN-HENSEL (1805–1847)
4 Lieder, Op. 8 (1846)
4 I. Lied: Allegro moderato [4:53]
5 III. Lied: Larghetto [3:26]
Teresa CARREÑO (1853–1917)
6 Un rêve en mer (A Dream at Sea) – Étude-méditation (1868) [5:47]
Leokadiya KASHPEROVA (1872–1940)
7 Au sein de la nature (In the Midst of Nature):
III. Le Murmure des blés (The Murmur of the Wheat) (1910) [3:21]
Fannie Charles DILLON (1881–1947)
8 8 Descriptive Pieces, Op. 20: No. 2, Birds at Dawn (1917) [2:55]
Vítězslava KAPRÁLOVÁ (1915–1940)
Dubnová preludia (April Preludes), Op. 13 (1937)
9 No. 1. Allegro ma non troppo [2:09]
10 A No. 3. Andante semplice [2:17]
Agi JAMBOR (1909–1997)
Piano Sonata: To the Victims of Auschwitz (1949) [15:23]
11. B I. Allegro appassionato [5:53]
12 C II. Epitaph: Andante teneramente [5:59]
13 D III. Allegro [3:31]
Eve BEGLARIAN (1958–)
(text: Ruth Crawford Seeger, 1901–1953)
14 Fireside (2001) 2 [6:05]
Deirdre GRIBBIN (1967–)
15 Unseen (2017) [6:24]
Mary D. WATKINS (1939–)
16 G Summer Days (2020) [4:39]