Album They Have Waited Long Enough out now!

It is with great pride that we are launching our new album They Have Waited Long Enough today, released by Channel Classics / Outhere Music. From today, Ragazze Quartet’s new album They Have Waited Long Enough is available to stream on all platforms and on CD. The video recording of Sortzain has also been released today.

Together with soprano Katharine Dain, we bring to life five new works for string quartet, soprano and solo instrument by female composers, each recorded for the very first time. The music on this album is a selection from nine songs in a song cycle in which women – so often silenced in history and mythology – speak for themselves. All the material on the album has been created and performed by women.

Works on the album:

1. Never Belonged (about Hecate) by Aftab Darvishi, performed by Ragazze Quartet, Katharine Dain & Raphaela Danksagmüller (duduk)
2. Medea by Annelies van Parys, performed by Ragazze Quartet, Katharine Dain & Anna voor de Wind (clarinet)
3. Penelope by Calliope Tsoupaki, performed by Ragazze Quartet, Katharine Dain & Osama Abdulrasol (qanun)
4. My Words Are Swallows (about Kassia) by Aida Shirazi, performed by Ragazze Quartet, Katharine Dain & Elif Canfezâ Gündüz
5. Sortzain (about Maria San Juan de Garonda) by Saskia Venegas Aernouts, performed by Ragazze Quartet, Katharine Dain, Marianne Soroka & Agata Kruszewska (txalaparte and other percussion instruments)

We are immensely grateful to all the musicians who made this album possible: Katharine Dain, Raphaela Danksagmüller, Osama Abdulrasol, Elif Canfezâ Gündüz, Marianne Soroka and Agate Kruszewska, but above all to Jared Sacks of Channel Classics, all the composers and librettists whose music we have been able to record, and last but not least Tamar Brüggemann, who, together with Katharine Dain, initiated the wider project They Have Waited Long Enough.

• The full album is now available to stream via They Have Waited Long Enough
• The CD is available from the Ragazze Quartet webshop: Our Music
• Alongside the CD, a limited-edition booklet has also been published featuring stories about all the women involved in the They Have Waited Long Enough project; this can also be ordered from the webshop
• Further information about the entire project, including our tour schedule and full credits, can be found on our programme page for They Have Waited Long Enough.

Video: Sortzain (Maria San Juan de Garonda) for soprano, string quartet, txalaparta and tape by Saskia Venegas Aernouts based on text by Natalie Haynes and Saskia Venegas Aernouts

The composition Sortzain (the Basque word for midwife) retells the story of the Basque midwife Maria San Juan de Garonda (? – 1508). Maria‘s “crime” was that she was remarkably skilled in her profession thanks to a method she had developed herself using herbs, which resulted in fewer babies and mothers dying in childbirth. Maria was persecuted as a witch during the great witch trials in the Basque Country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was murdered, hanged and then burned.

Composer Saskia Venegas Aernouts grew up in the Basque Country, near the site where a major witch trial took place in 1507. “Maria San Juan de Garonda symbolises the whole group of hidden heroines from that period in the Basque Country,” says Venegas. “She was a brave woman and maintained her innocence right to the end. All she wanted was to help others bring new life into the world.” In Venegas’s work, the female musicians – vocals, string quartet, percussion – form a tribe: the power of the music created by this entire group of women and the beauty of their collaboration are intended to bring to the fore both Maria’s soul and the creative power that women possess. As a solo instrument, Venegas chose the txalaparta, a Basque percussion instrument that must be played by two people.