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Following her number one album Femmes (2023) which focused on a kaleidoscope of female composers from the Baroque to the present day, cellist Raphaela Gromes is continuing her exploration of works by female composers with Fortissima.
Released on 12 September, Fortissima will focus on major works – sonatas, concertos, orchestral pieces – by female artists that have been neglected in music history.
Gromes and her long-time piano partner Julian Riem aim to bring these forgotten musical gems back into the concert hall and into music catalogues. Many works on Fortissima were inaccessible until recently – either lost, gathering dust in private estates or simply never published.
’During my training, I never came into contact with female role models,’ says Gromes. ’For a long time, I thought they hardly existed.
’It was only when I was researching for Femmes and Fortissima that I realised how many outstanding female composers there were – they were just systematically ignored. Their music is often breathtakingly good. I want to pass this knowledge on – to young female musicians, to the public, to the world.’
The first part of Fortissima combines works for cello and piano – by Henriëtte Bosmans, Victoria Yagling, Emilie Mayer, Mélanie Bonis and Luise Adolpha Le Beau, among others. The programme is complemented by an arrangement of Adele’s ‘All I Ask’ as a bonus track.
Part two focuses on works for cello and orchestra, with works by Maria Herz, Elisabeth Kuyper, Marie Jaëll, Rebecca Dale, as well as an orchestral cover of P!nk’s anthem ’Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken’.
Additionally, the album will be released alongside the accompanying non-fiction book of the same title, published by Goldmann Verlag. Along with musicologist Susanne Wosnitzka, Gromes explores the forgotten stories of the album’s composers.
Gromes spoke with The Strad about her latest project.
‘Fortissima’ follows up from ‘Femmes’ and focuses on larger scale works by female composers. How did you go about finding these works? Had you heard of them before, were they recommended to you, or did you have to do some research?
The almost unbelievable fact is: I never heard of any of those works before – also not during my studies at the universities in Munich, Leipzig and Vienna. But during Covid, a feminist friend of mine said: ’Now is the time to do some research. What about female composers?’
That´s what I did, and I was totally overwhelmed by what I found, by the sheer multitude and also the quality of works by women whose names I had never heard before. When I started to work on Femmes, I quickly realised that this could only be the beginning. Fortissima was the next logical step, bringing together some of the larger works I had found —cello sonatas and concertos.
I was working together with the Archive Frau und Musik in Frankfurt and had access to scores from publishers like Hildegard Publishing and Furore Verlag. We picked the sonatas that my piano partner Julian Riem and I enjoyed the most in our duo concerts in the last few years.
The Sonata by Henriëtte Bosmans became one of my absolute favourite works of the Romantic period. We are especially happy that Henle is publishing a brand-new edition of this big sonata alongside the release of our album, and Julian and I even had the honour to contribute bowings and comments for this edition.
When I was finishing the programme, I still felt something was missing. Right at that moment, I received an email from a man called Albert Herz. The subject line was: ’Cello Concerto by my grandmother Maria Herz.’ I opened the score of this truly amazing piece and thought: this is it. This was the missing piece.
The concerto had never been premiered, because Jewish composers were forbidden under the Nazi regime. Maria Herz fled Germany, first to England and later to the US, and she never composed again. The fact that her genius concerto suddenly landed in my inbox exactly at that moment felt like serendipity.
Of course, not every work came to me so easily. Elisabeth Kuyper’s Ballade, for instance, had once been premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic, but today no orchestral score was to be found. The only surviving source was a piano version. So Julian sat down and reconstructed the orchestral voices from it. Thanks to his work, this beautiful piece can now be heard again in orchestral colours.
Is there a particular work on the album that you’d like to highlight?
It’s not easy to pick one piece, because I obviously love all of them. But if I had to highlight one, it would be Marie Jaëll’s Cello Concerto, the very first concerto for cello ever written by a woman.
Jaëll had a successful career as a pianist, but as a composer she didn’t gain the recognition she earned. She studied with Saint-Saëns, whom she met through her husband Alfred Jaëll. Franz Liszt admired her greatly – also her compositions – and once said that if a man’s name were written on her music, everyone would be playing it.
She wrote her cello concerto after the death of both her beloved husband and her mother. For me, this grief and loss is especially present in the second movement, which I consider the heart of the concerto. This movement had never been recorded or orchestrated before. Julian and I found the manuscripts in the National Library in Strasbourg and created, alongside the premiere recording, a new edition of the concerto with all four movements.
This way, it becomes possible for other cellists, orchestras, and promoters to program this wonderful piece, which deserves to be heard much more often.
What was the reasoning behind including two works by modern pop stars, Adele and P!nk? Can you tell us a little bit about these arrangements?
Fortissima is a ‘femmage’ to heroines of music and to strong women across time. Adele and P!nk are among today’s most authentic icons in music, writing melodies that are both moving and memorable, songs I love to bring to life on the cello.
In the case of P!nk, I find her voice especially powerful and fearless. Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken was written as a feminist chant, about resilience, the refusal to be silenced, and the fight for freedom and equality. Including it in the programme felt very natural.
The arrangements, like all arrangements by Julian Riem, stay close to the originals. They are cover versions, and at the same time a bow to the strength of the original voices.
Fortissima is released on 12 September 2025 on Sony Classical.
Raphaela Gromes and Julian Riem will perform a Fortissima release concert on 11 October at the Elgar Room, Royal Albert Hall, London.
Watch Raphaela Gromes perform Méditation in F Major, Op.33 by Mel Bonis in the video below:
