German guitarist Chris Bilobram undertook two years of research aimed at uncovering neglected guitar music by women. The results are a bit uneven, but she has certainly succeeded in putting together a program of rarities -- most of the music has rarely if ever been recorded, and one work, Germaine Tailleferre's Concerto for two guitars and orchestra, is apparently played here for the first time. It's pleasant enough if rather pale compared with the Parisian 1920s environment in which Tailleferre began her career as the only female member of Les Six (the work was written in the 1960s), and it sounds a bit like scaled-down Respighi. Two composers on the program, Argentina's Maria Luisa Anido and the Italian Emilia Giuliani-Guglielmi, were daughters of famous male guitarists, Juan Carlos Anido and Mauro Giuliani, respectively. The Anido pieces, curiously, are not especially virtuosic, featuring languid tango and creole melodies, but Giuliani-Guglielmi's Variations on a theme of Mercadante, Op. 9, are a showpiece (check out the bent notes in the middle that sound like exertions of a blues guitarist). Giuliani-Guglielmi apparently even extended her father's techniques, and, in a semi-scholarly recording like this, it would have been nice to see more technical detail in the booklet. There are two contemporary pieces, and perhaps the most attractive work on the whole disc is one written for Bilobram: the Falkenfantasie (or Falcon Fantasy) for guitar and piano (2004). That's an unusual combination to begin with, and Elizabeth R. Austin, an American composer working in Germany, deploys the two instruments so as to create a spectrum of plucked-string sonorities: the pianist uses a variety of extended techniques, including strumming the strings. Put together with some programmatic evocations of the titular bird, they create some very vivid images and sounds. The final movements for guitar and strings by Baroque composer Camilla de Rossi are less interesting; rather plain, short utterances, they constitute an instrumental interlude in an oratorio and were originally composed for the lute. Bilobram's guitar is nicely recorded by producer Klaus-Jürgen Kamprad, however, and there's enough genuinely intriguing music here to recommend the disc for good collections of music by female composers.