“A new record label devoted to releasing music by forgotten women composers will be launched this September,” writes Hannah Nepilova in Tuesday’s (7/26) BBC Music (U.K.). “Founded by cellist Héloïse Luzzati, La Boîte à Pépites launches on 30 September with its debut album: a 3-CD boxset of the complete works by Charlotte Sohy [1887-1955]. This will be followed, in 2023, with a CD of music by Rita Strohl [1865-1942], with many other women in the pipeline, including the British composers Liza Lehmann [1862-1918], Alice Mary Smith [1839-1884] and Adela Maddison [1862-1929]. The record label forms one part of the ‘Elles: Women Composers’ project—devised by Luzzati—which began with the creation of the ‘Un Temps pour Elles’ music Festival in France and was soon followed by the YouTube channel ‘La Boîte à Pépites’ which today contains more than 60 videos, from animated documentaries to a video advent calendar. The aim behind it all, according to Luzzati, is ‘to exhume pieces that seemed worthy of a good position in the standard musical repertoire’—many of which have never been recorded or have been lost over time.”
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