Firma Melodiya presents a new album of composer and pianist Anton Batagov, one of the most original and iconic musicians of our time. The album 16+ is a homage to female poetry: sixteen poems created in different centuries and millennia. Nine of the texts are in English, and seven of them are in Russian. Of the nine English ones, three were written by English authors of the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries – Anne Askew, Anne Wharton and Emily Brontë, three by American ones of the 19th to 21st centuries – Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale and Maya Angelou, and three were translated into English from Sumerian (Enheduanna, 23rd century B.C.), Middle Dutch (Hadewijch, 13th century) and Hindi (Mirabai, 16th century). The Russian poetry includes texts of the poets of the 19th to 21st centuries – Evdokia Nagrodskaya, Zinaida Gippius, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Iskrenko and Vera Polozkova. One of the texts is in Church Slavonic – a translation of St Kassia of Constantinople (9th century) from Greek; her texts are a part of the canon of the Russian Orthodox Church. All sixteen authors are unique personalities. Reading their biographies makes a tremendous impression in itself. Although the texts were written in different times and ages, Anton Batagov says that “they are, in general, about the same thing: about love that a woman experiences deeply and uncompromisingly; about love when God and the beloved one are the same. What womankind received as a gift from the universe is the “lunar secret” that can be a destructive weapon, but the incomprehensible female nature transforms domination into self-denial, dissolves strength in tenderness, and the truth feels like a natural free space state, where there is nothing but love, rather than a result of logical thinking and arguments. This is where all our encounters take place, and any travels are just different versions of the route that leads there”.