When American pianist Lana Bode and British soprano Samantha Crawford first met, little did they realise that they would have so much in common. Lana, who now lives in London, was 17 by the time that she had saved enough money to escape her evangelical fundamentalist community in rural Virginia and attend music college; while Samantha, who is a married mother of two, comes from a long line of strong independent women who were the breadwinners and whose parents in her Christian home were totally supportive of her musical ambitions.

While the worlds in which Lana and Samantha grew up may seem leagues apart, what both artists bonded over was the need to find music which reflected the diversity of their experiences. Increasingly frustrated and disillusioned by the lack of representation in traditional song repertoire, the pair set about curating a programme which would tell the stories of women from a woman’s perspective. dream.risk.sing: elevating women’s voices is a labour of love developed over the course of 2020; the result of hours of research through hundreds of songs and poems to find those that most reflected five specific aspects of a woman’s life: growing up, love and lust, motherhood, career and legacy.

On 20 October as part of Oxford Lieder Festival’s 20^th anniversary season, Bode and Crawford present a pared down version of dream.risk.sing, featuring the world première of Crossing Faultlines, a new song cycle commissioned from composer Charlotte Bray and poet Nicki Jackowska, believed to be the first song cycle to address the topic of women in the workplace. Alongside this new work exploring themes of mentorship, discrimination and ambition are new piano arrangements of two poems Breasts!! and Edge from Judith Weir’s woman.life.song written for Jessye Norman, and the inspiration for dream.risk.sing; Carson Cooman’s Ballad from Gold into Diamonds about women oppressed through religious fundamentalism; Ricky Ian Gordon’s musical-theatre song My Mother is a Singer paying tribute to his mother and the sacrifices she made for him; two songs from Helen Grime’s Bright Travellers cycle on modern motherhood; and singer-songwriter Michele Brourman’s My Daughters about passing the torch to future generations of women. Also featured on the programme are two earlier works: Antonin Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me and Florence Price’s The Heart of a Woman, the first black female composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra.