There is an evident risk today in projects dedicated to women composers: that good intentions remain entirely in the paratext—between slogans and press kits—while the music is reduced to an exemplary “document”. Anna Urpina’s album Le Chant des Muses fortunately belongs to the opposite category: here, the idea of bringing forgotten women composers back to the foreground becomes a work of rigorous musical construction, conceived in detail, and not a mere reparatory gesture.

A Catalan violinist born in Vic in 1989, Urpina belongs to a generation that no longer feels the need to choose between modern and historical instruments: she moves naturally on both fronts and has studied with reference figures such as Enrico Onofri on the Baroque side.

In Le Chant des Muses she plays the seventeenth-century pieces on a 1658 violin attributed to Nicolò Amati, while for the two contemporary commissions she switches to a modern setup—thus declaring from the outset that continuity between past and present is not a slogan, but a concrete matter of sound, posture, configuration.

The project, produced by Eudora Records and recorded at the Auditori de Girona in September 2024, brings together a small chamber ensemble: alongside Urpina, soprano María Hinojosa, Daniel Oyarzábal (harpsichord, organ, piano), Nicola Brovelli (cello), and Nacho Laguna (theorbo and guitar).

The sound engineering—up to the usual high standards of the Spanish label—enhances the definition of detail without losing the sense of real space: the instruments are close, but not “on top” of the listener, and the voice finds a natural placement within the group.

The album’s journey spans almost three centuries of music written by women: from Gracia Baptista, active in the first half of the sixteenth century, to the very recent pages of Zulema de la Cruz and Helena Cánovas Parés, both living composers. At the centre lies a Baroque mosaic that links the Italy of Isabella Leonarda, Francesca Caccini, Maddalena Casulana, and Marieta Morosina Priuli to the France of Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Anne Madeleine Guédon de Presles, Mademoiselle Duval and Buttier, and finally to the English figure of Lady Mary Dering.

It is not a simple anthology: the sequence of pieces builds a genuine internal “dramaturgy”. Leonarda’s Sonata Op. 16 No. 12, which opens the programme, functions almost as a manifesto: in just under nine minutes it moves from contrapuntal inflections to highly singable zones, and Urpina highlights the overall design even before the ornamental detail. The bow is firmly grounded, the articulation clear, yet the line remains flexible: the “intelligence” of the form never suffocates the cantabile impulse.
Immediately afterwards, the shift to Francesca Caccini (Lasciatemi qui solo) redirects the focus to the word: here Hinojosa’s voice comes to the fore, with a clear, lightly vibrated emission that reveals the work on the text. Urpina’s violin does not attempt to “imitate” the vocal line, but comments on it: brief gestures that frame it, echoing certain melodic inflections with discretion.

Mademoiselle Duval’s small theatrical cycle Air pour les Plaisirs brings the music back onto the terrain of French dance. Here Urpina enjoys sculpting the rhythmic profiles: the Bourrée, the Menuet, the Sarabande do not become postcard images of ancient style but small scenes in motion, supported by the continuo of Oyarzábal, Brovelli, and Laguna—always precise but never rigid.

Zulema de la Cruz’s Canciones de Amor, written expressly for this project, introduce a different harmonic density and another way of working on the relationship between voice and instruments: the piano replaces the harpsichord, the harmonic language opens to more explicit tensions, yet what stands out is the emotional continuity with the seventeenth-century pages. Urpina chooses a fuller, more direct sound here—almost a “foreground” writing—that does not break the thread of the programme but expands its horizon.

Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre’s Sonata I is perhaps the moment in which the ensemble most clearly displays its compactness. The dialogue between violin, bass, and keyboard is conducted with a very clear sense of proportion: contrasts between grave sections and livelier ones are managed without abrupt jolts, and the rhetoric of the affects remains legible without modern psychological over-interpretation.

The madrigal Morir non può il mio core by Maddalena Casulana, rendered in an intimate guise, stands out for the quality of the vocal line: Hinojosa avoids any “antique” patina, opting instead for a simple, almost spoken phrasing over which the violin intervenes occasionally, with small gestures that shape certain crucial cadences. It is one of the points where the album most forcefully reminds us that these women musicians are not “curiosities” but authors capable of shaping complex musical thought.

The Correnti by Marieta Morosina Priuli, written for violin and spinet, receive a lively and controlled reading: Urpina emphasises their motor energy, the continuo firmly supports their structure; these are short but revealing pages, which show a conscious, far-from-naive violinistic writing.

Bringing the journey to a close is Lady Mary Dering with A False Designe to be Cruell: a short piece, yet characterised by remarkable rhetorical finesse. The choice not to overload the pathos but to keep it at a kind of “low voltage” makes the album’s farewell particularly well measured: no striking effects, rather a sort of after-thought that continues to resonate after the last note.

On the interpretative level, Le Chant des Muses confirms a quality already evident in Anna Urpina’s previous work: the ability to hold together structural clarity and communicative immediacy. The bow is firm, the articulations carefully studied, but what remains in the mind is the overall naturalness of the discourse: no virtuosic self-indulgence, no gratuitous “effects”, but rather a constant focus on the quality of sound, on internal relationships, on the equilibrium between planes.

The ensemble’s contribution is decisive: Brovelli’s cello and Laguna’s theorbo draw an elastic basso continuo that dispels any suspicion of inert accompaniment; Oyarzábal moves with agility from harpsichord to organ to piano, adapting the timbral impact to periods and contexts. Hinojosa’s voice, finally, integrates into the group with notable intelligence: always present, never egocentric, placed on a line of expression that privileges the text and the precise intonation of its inflections.

In a recording landscape increasingly filled—sometimes too hastily—with collections devoted to “women composers”, Anna Urpina’s album stands out because it unites research, programming taste, and a consistently high interpretative level. Not everything is designed to impress at first hearing; many pages ask to be revisited, listened to again, placed within a wider network of references.