They Have Waited Long Enough is the tenth album from the all-female Ragazze Quartet, and their most pointed act of advocacy yet: five silenced women from history and myth are given voices of their own, in newly composed song cycles for soprano, string quartet, and a rotating cast of non-Western solo instruments that function as each woman’s alter ego. Working with soprano Katharine Dain and librettists including Gaea Schoeters and Natalie Haynes, five women composers — Aftab Darvishi, Annelies Van Parys, Calliope Tsoupaki, Aida Shirazi, and Saskia Venegas Aernouts — reimagine Circe, Medea, Penelope, the poet Kassia, and the Basque midwife Maria San Juan de Garonda, each paired with an instrument (duduk, clarinet, qanun, kemenche, and Basque percussion) that becomes a second voice for her inner life.

Commissioned by Wonderfeel Festival as part of an ongoing project begun in 2021, the cycle insists that these historical and mythological figures — long spoken for, or silenced altogether — finally speak for themselves. Recorded at the Koepelkerk in Renswoude, the album is both a showcase for underrepresented composers and a bracingly personal statement from an ensemble whose own story, as four women in a still unequal field, runs through every track.

Katharine Dain – soprano
Ragazze Quartet
Rosa Arnold & Jeanita Vriens – violins
Annemijn Bergkotte – viola
Nathalie Flintrop – cello