Ruby Hughes

Having released their debut album In motion in 2020, the musicians that make up United Strings of Europe (USE) return with another innovative program: Renewal.

In 2015, when Ruby Hughes discovered Clytemnestra by the Welsh composer Rhian Samuel, the work had not been performed since its première some 20 years earlier. Hughes describes the 24-minute score as ‘sun-scorched and luscious’ as well as ‘intensely visceral’, but in it she also heard echoes of Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, two of Samuel’s influences.

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.

Excelling in Renaissance and baroque repertoire, the young British soprano Ruby Hughes pays tribute to Handels last prima donna, the Italian soprano Giulia Frasi. For her debut recording on Chandos she has chosen a selection of celebrated arias composed for Frasi by Handel, in his late oratorios Susanna, Solomon, Theodora, and Jephtha, and other composers of the era, whose works are now much less familiar, offering several modern premieres. Performed on period instruments by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Laurence Cummings, and recorded in surroundsound, this programme is unique of its kind.

Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony started life as a single-movement tone poem called Todtenfeier (‘Funeral Rites’). Completed in 1888 – one year before Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration – it echoed the composer's vision of seeing himself lying dead in a funeral bier surrounded by flowers. Deciding to use it as his opening movement, Mahler didn't finish the complete five-movement symphony until more than six years later, the longest time he spent on any work. The huge scale of the work apart, its weighty subject matter may well have contributed to the slow progress: Mahler himself outlined a scenario making references to the ultimate meaning of life and death (first movement), recollections of lost innocence and the desperation of unbelief (second and third movements), the return to naïve faith (fourth movement) and final redemption from the last judgement (finale).

Huw Watkins’ song cycle Echo, composed for soprano Ruby Hughes and premiered in 2017 at Carnegie Hall, is at the centre of this artfully crafted recital. Setting texts by five different poets, the cycle is a work centred on melancholy – on transience, remembrance, and in the final song a numbed cry of inconceivable loss. As such it permeates the entire programme, adding a new and unexpected depth to that which precedes as well as follows.

After the success of the first fourteen reissues, which restored to the limelight some of the gems of the early music repertory in the catalogues of our labels, here are fourteen new titles to allow listeners to renew acquaintance with further treasures of the Renaissance and Baroque (and even a journey through time thanks to Raphaël Imbert’s album Bach Coltrane), performed by some of the leading interpreters of the genre; most of these discs won one or more awards on their first release.

After the success of the first fourteen reissues, which restored to the limelight some of the gems of the early music repertory in the catalogues of our labels, here are fourteen new titles to allow listeners to renew acquaintance with further treasures of the Renaissance and Baroque (and even a journey through time thanks to Raphaël Imbert’s album Bach Coltrane), performed by some of the leading interpreters of the genre; most of these discs won one or more awards on their first release.

Having released their debut album In motion in 2020, the musicians that make up United Strings of Europe (USE) return with another innovative program: Renewal.

Heroines of Love and Mourning ", this is the perfect characteristic of this album, which soprano Ruby Hugues, the cellist Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann and the lutenist Jonas Nordberg dedicate to a fine handful of works in which the ladies sing both, other. And when one says that "ladies sing", it is in every sense of the word: a soprano, female heroines among which the heartbreaking Dido de Purcell, and also composers of the baroque period such as the famous Barbara Strozzi, the nun Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini and Lucrezia Vizzana, all of whom contributed to the music of their time, even though it was hard to see a woman as a full-fledged artist.