Katelyn Bouska Women and War and Peace 180g 45rpm LP

Executive Producer: Patrick Trostle

Women and War and Peace took shape during concert pianist Katelyn Bouska's darkest days of isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. She missed her family and friends, her students at Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and her live performances in front of living, breathing audiences. To use the time productively, Bouska revisited women composers she wanted to explore and realized many of them shared a common theme. They were refugees, or they barely survived, or didn't survive, and the fact that they were women at the cutting edge of the contemporary music scenes in their various environments made their situations even more difficult. Our earliest composer, Maria Szymanowska, died in the 1830 cholera outbreak instigated by Russia's invasion of Poland under Tsar Nicholas I. One of our younger composers, Ludmila Yurina, fled her home in Ukraine and found refuge first in the United Kingdom and then Germany after Russia's invasion in February of 2022 by President Vladimir Putin. Our vinyl pressing includes Szymanowska's entrancing Mazurkas and her monumental Fantaisie in F Major. We open the album with Caroline Shaw's Gustave Le Gray. Caroline is our one composer in the project not directly affected by war.

Katelyn Bouska is both American and Czech. She was born in the United States, but spends many months a year performing and lecturing in Prague. Stretching from composers born in the 1700s through the 20th Century, Kate's repertoire on the full digital release includes music by Caroline Shaw, Maria Szymanowska, Ruth Schoental, Ivana Loudova, Vitezslava Kapralova and Ludmila Yurina.

—Bob Attiyeh, producer

Katelyn Bouska is extremely talented and plays with superb sophistication. With so many styles among the composers, she interprets each with an originality that is very special. I wish she was touring in America. What a magnificent pianist! ... This is a reference piano recording of the first order. Most highly recommended.

This is simply a marvelous album. Most highly recommended!

...one of the most compelling releases of 2023 thus far....Bouska is a scholar as well as a pianist, and likely her research deserves the credit for this altogether fascinating, beautifully performed repertory.