A Winged Woman

Dedicated to contemporary music, A Winged Woman captures The Marian Consort’s pioneering work creating an ambitious and expanding body of new work for vocal ensemble. The album features seven world premiere recordings from a crop of the UK’s finest composers, including Dani Howard, Electra Perivolaris, and Ben Rowarth alongside works by James MacMillan, Howard Skempton and Rebecca Clarke.

The works challenge traditions and tropes in imaginative and refreshing ways, bringing together a rich array of musical styles and textual approaches. The titular work, A Winged Woman by Electra Perivolaris, encapsulates The Marian Consort’s distinctive, collaborative approach in commissioning new music. Incorporating techniques from the Gaelic Psalm Tradition of the Isle of Arran, where Perivolaris spent much of her childhood, it brings together a patchwork of texts by Hildegard of Bingen and Heather Dohollau in an examination of female creativity, imagination, self-doubt and transcendence

Chloe Knibbs responds to the life and music of Raffaella Aleotti, one of the few women from the late Renaissance to have successfully carved out a position for herself in the history of the sacred music of this period. Dani Howard looks at different perspectives of women through history with a tapestry of Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and the Song of Songs. Phillip Cooke sets a version of the Magnificat, the song of Mary, in Scots. These are just some of the highlights of a thrilling set of new works, each distinctive, beautiful and urgent in its own way.

Longlisted in the German Record Critics’ Award, January 2024