Katelyn Bouska – Women and War and Peace (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:23:21 minutes | 1,35 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Yarlung Records
Yarlung executive producer Patrick Trostle heard pianist Katelyn Bouska perform in Bohemian National Concert Hall at the Czech Center in New York City. This was 2021, as the pandemic was beginning to lessen, after live concerts again became possible. Patrick called me a few days later, saying he had just heard this magnificent concert pianist performing works by women composers displaced or destroyed by 200 years of European wars.“You need to meet Kate,” Patrick said, “and I think you should record her. Kate not only performs in concert halls around the world, but she’s a lightning-smart academic at Curtis Institute researching and lecturing regularly on Central and Eastern European composers close to her heart.”
Women and War and Peace took shape during concert pianist Katelyn Bouska’s darkest days of isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. She missed her family and friends, her students at Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and her live performances in front of living breathing audiences. To use the time productively, Bouska revisited women composers she wanted to explore and realized many of them shared a common theme.
They were refugees, or they barely survived, or didn’t survive, and the fact that they were women at the cutting edge of the contemporary music scenes in their various environments made their situations even more difficult. Our earliest composer, Maria Szymanowska, died in the 1830 cholera outbreak instigated by Russia’s invasion of Poland under Tsar Nicholas I. One of our younger composers, Ludmila Yurina, fled her home in Ukraine and found refuge first in the United Kingdom and then Germany after Russia’s invasion in February of 2022 by President Vladimir Putin.
Tracklist:
1-1. Katelyn Bouska – Gustave Le Gray (14:03)
1-2. Katelyn Bouska – Mazurkas (02:29)
1-3. Katelyn Bouska – Fantasie (09:11)
1-4. Katelyn Bouska – Fragments from a Woman’s Diary (11:52)
1-5. Katelyn Bouska – Prague Imaginations (27:05)
1-6. Katelyn Bouska – Dubnova preludia (11:57)
1-7. Katelyn Bouska – Shadows and Ghosts (06:42)
Download: