愛與失落的女英雄 魯比·休絲 女高音 / Ruby Hughes, soprano / Heroines of Love and Loss

The women appearing before our ears throughout this
programme range from the Virgin Mary and Dido, queen of
Carthage, to Shakespeare's Desdemona and the unfortunate
Anne Boleyn, waiting for her execution in the Tower of London
in 1536. But the disc also features four other heroines – the
Italian composers Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia
Vizzana and Barbara Strozzi. All active between 1590 – 1675,
they will have required great courage to rise above the social
conventions of the time, but this surprisingly productive period
for female composers also offered an opportunity that would
disappear in later centuries: the all-female environment
provided by the convent. More than half of the women who
published music before 1700 were nuns, including Sessa and
Vizzana, who are here represented by brief meditations on the
suffering and death of Christ.

Caccini and Strozzi, on the other hand, lived very much in the
secular world – Caccini at the Florentine court and Strozzi as a
free-lance musician and composer in Venice. Unhindered by the
restrictions imposed by the church on sacred music they both
adhered to the new stile moderno championed by Claudio
Monteverdi. Celebrated for their singing, they composed vocal
music which makes 'the words the mistress of the harmony and
not the servant', to quote Monteverdi's brother Giulio Cesare.
The soprano Ruby Hughes has already made her name for
herself in a wide-ranging repertoire, but has a special love for
the constellation of lute, cello and voice. With Jonas Nordberg
and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann – who also contribute
instrumental solos – she here revels in the dramatic and
expressive potential offered by this trio combination, and by
the music by these female composers and their English
colleagues Henry Purcell and John Bennet.