Sang de Dona

Anna Amigó, harp. Self-released, 2025.

Also of note is Catalan harpist and vocalist Anna Amigó’s debut album Sang de Dona (Women’s Blood). For many years, Amigó has been sifting through the music of her native region of Spain, looking specifically for music that represents women’s empowerment. Simple and repetitive, these 12 carefully chosen songs were designed to be easily memorized and sung along to. They represent entire lifetimes filled with family, friends, love, travel, but also loneliness and uncertainty. Amigó illuminates the word painting with contrasts of lyrical and percussive styles on her traditional harp, often adding extended techniques to underscore a point. Her playing matches the depth of her mezzo—rich, husky, and filled with equal parts hope and pathos. Though it might seem a bit cliché, the overdubbing of her voice becomes like a chorus of women everywhere, all in this life together. 

Ciels d’Or

Trio Haydée: Constance Luzzati, harp; Marielou Jacquard, mezzo; and Anastasie Lefebvre de Rieux, flute. Voces8 Records, 2025

Staying with this theme of powerful women, Trio Haydée’s Ciels d’Or (Golden Skies) is an album made up of works by lesser-known female composers, played by an all-women ensemble of Marielou Jacquard, mezzo; Anastasie Lefebvre de Rieux, flute; and Constance Luzzati, harp. Luminous and deliciously performed, composers include Grace Williams, Édith Canat de Chizy, Josephine Stephenson, Pauline Viardot, and Rosy Wertheim. Their repertoire is focused on twilight, that time of obscurity and ambiguity when “night and day refuse to come”—a theme playful in one composer’s hand, while nightmarish in another’s. The musicians offer scintillatingly expressive performances, veiled in pastels, yet always alert to each other’s voice. This recording is a revelation of tonal possibilities as well as the wide palette available when a composer chooses to write music with words. Absolutely exquisite!