Building on the success of our first three Women of Note albums, ABC Classic is thrilled to be releasing the fourth volume in our now annual celebration of Australia’s female composers.

Released to coincide with International Women’s Day (8 March), this album begins and ends with works by Indigenous composers that focus on the importance of connection, communication and deep listening: Lou Bennett’s Baiyan Woka and Brenda Gifford’s Djana, drawing on the composers’ respective Yorta Yorta and Yuin heritages.

From the Flinders Quartet comes a new, world premiere recording of Margaret Sutherland’s 1956 Quartet for Cor Anglais and String Trio. This highly expressive and rhythmically playful work was written in a period of new-found artistic freedom, in the years following her divorce from her psychiatrist husband who believed that her claim to be a serious composer was evidence of mental illness. Fellow Australian music pioneer Miriam Hyde appears as the soloist in a landmark 1975 recording of her own Second Piano Concerto, a richly Romantic work composed during her student years in London and premiered at the time by no less than the London Symphony Orchestra.

The tracklist then turns to music written within the last few years, demonstrating the talent and vision of Australia’s living female composers. In “Fuglar himins” (Birds of Heaven), Rósalind Page uses the soprano saxophone to evoke the wild beauty of the gyrfalcon, gliding over the magnificent fjords of Iceland, where she has worked and travelled extensively. Award-winning jazz artist Andrea Keller uses fluctuating states of expansion and contraction, celebration and darkness, to express a sense of inner struggle and a search for peace in I Surrender, inspired by experiences of extended pandemic lockdown in Melbourne. And the Fire Dances suite brings together eight women composers from across all of Australia’s states and territories to reflect on the impact of 2020’s devastating bushfires.