They Have Waited Long Enough

Exclusively in Stereo and 5 Channel Surround Sound DSD at NativeDSD

They Have Waited Long Enough is the tenth album at NativeDSD 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.

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Katharine Dain, Soprano Ragazze Quartet Rosa Arnold - Violin Jeanita Vriens - Violin Annemijn Bergkotte - Viola Nathalie Flintrop - Cello