Various Artists - Donna Voce - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Despite Music being a feminine noun in most of the languages, the world of music is predominantly dominated by men. If you were to ask a random passer-by to name a composer, no doubt that he or she could name a male one without too much trouble. I'm afraid, though, that only few would name a female composer. And yet the relationship between women and music has always produced very interesting outcomes regarding both the performance as well as the composition. As early as the Renaissance there have been women who, despite the social and cultural context of their time, contributed to music with compositions that have nothing to envy to those of the most famous male composers. However, these pieces are very rarely considered as part of the repertoire and remain for the most part unknown. This project is dedicated to the organ music by female composers in the twentieth and twenty-first century, period in which the 'women's voice' finally reached the masses thanks to the growth of the female presence in the composition field. An extraordinary repertoire for which I chose the great InchMascioniInch organ of the InchPontificio Istituto di Musica SacraInch in Rome, a benchmark for sacred music from which we start telling for the first time this Inchall pinkInch page of history.

An ensemble comprising oboe, bassoon and pianoforte is certainly the offspring of the violin-cello-pianoforte trio but produces a wonderful sound world all it's own, combining the three instruments perfectly. Which is why the Linguaggi Sonori Ensemble commissioned a series of trios from a number of contemporary Italian composers in order to explore the range of sounds which this lineup is capable of producing and to enrich the repertoire for it. The result is instrumental timbres and compositional techniques owing something to the twentieth-century avantgarde or to Minimalism in their own right, yet more often than not is a fusion of these elements resulting in something new and exciting from the combination of oboe, bassoon and pianoforte.

Various Artists - Vocal Works / Various [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/24/2006