Reviews
GMCD 7317 Amy Beach
(1867-1944) - Piano Music, Vol. 1: The Early Works Kirsten Johnson, piano
MusicWeb International Thursday December 04 2008
Charming miniatures which show a good deal of
promise of greater things ... Steve Arloff
Amy BEACH
(1867-1944)
Piano Music Vol.1: The Early Works
Sketches, op.15: In Autumn [2:14] Phantoms [2:04]
Dreaming [5:00] Fire-flies [3:20]
Mamma’s Waltz (1872) [2:01]
Menuetto (1877) [1:28]
Romanza (1877) [1:33]
Petite Valse (1878) [1:36]
Air and Variations (1877) [3:47]
Valse Caprice, op.4 [5:09]
Ballade, op.6 [9:21]
Bal Masqué, op.22 [3:37]
Children’s Carnival, op. 25: Promenade [2:23] Columbine [1:58]
Pantalon [1:11] Pierrot et Pierrette [1:38] Secrets [1:43]
Harlequin [1:25]
Trois morceaux caractéristiques, op.28: Barcarolle [6:06]
Menuet italien [2:57] Danse des fleurs [3:51]
Kirsten Johnson (piano)
rec. St. George’s, Bristol, 24-25 April 2007. DDD
GUILD GMCD7317 [65:32]
I first came across Amy
Beach’s music some 15 years ago when I bought a box set with the intriguing
title of Chamber Works by Women Composers. It included Amy Beach’s trio
for piano, violin and cello, op.150 (Vox Box 11 58452) together with music by
Clara Schumann, Germaine Tailleferre, Lili Boulanger, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel,
Teresa Carreño and Cecile Chaminade. Since then I’ve added Amy Beach’s Symphony
in E Minor, Op.32 (Gaelic) (Chandos CHAN 8958) and have reviewed her
Quartet in One Movement for MusicWeb International on a disc that included
chamber music by Ethel Smyth and the fascinatingly named Susan Spain-Dunk (Lorelt
LNT114). I have found all her music to be highly inventive and deeply affecting.
This disc is the first of a series to include all Beach’s piano works and I look
forward to hearing the rest. The works on this first offering are all early ones
- Mamma’s Waltz was composed in her head away from the piano at the
tender age of just 4 and one of 4 waltzes she composed that same summer of 1872!
- and the latest works were composed when she was 27.
Amy Marcey Cheney was born on 5 September 1867 in New Hampshire, USA and began
showing exceptional musical promise at a very early age and had a blossoming
career as a concert pianist which was curtailed by her mother who didn’t want
her tour and later on by her husband who would not allow her to accept payment
for playing but did allow her to play at charity concerts. This kind of
behaviour on the part of parents and husbands is an oft-repeated scenario in
respect of women in the arts but who can blame Amy Beach’s mother for not
wanting her young daughter to tour, despite offers from several concert
managers, at the age of 8! However, this attitude did not prevent her mother
allowing her to study piano first with Ernst Perabo, a teacher at the New
England Conservatory of Music and later with Carl Baermann, a Liszt pupil. Her
mother also permitted her to make her debut at 16 playing Ignaz Moscheles’
Concerto No.2 in G Minor. Her marriage in 1885 to H.H.A. Beach, a respected
Boston physician 24 years her senior, meant any hope of a professional career as
a pianist was permanently ended but Dr. Beach did encourage her to compose as
had her own father. Though Amy considered herself first and foremost a pianist
her musical energy was channelled into composing and she left a considerable
legacy of compositions including many songs and choral works, a good deal of
chamber music, piano works and an opera.
The works on this disc show a highly inventive mind which, at a very young age,
was capable of producing charming miniatures which showed a good deal of promise
of greater things to come. I found the pieces on this record delightful and,
while they could hardly be described as great music constitute an interesting
musical record of a lesser known composer whose development continued throughout
her life. Her works are programmed to this day and should become better known by
music-lovers everywhere. On this disc they are played by American pianist
Kirsten Johnson who, I presume will be recording the rest of Beach’s oeuvre for
piano. She plays the pieces with conviction and obviously enjoys bringing
unknown works before the public. Her other discs include works by Hermann Goetz
and Heinrich Schulz-Beuthen and two discs of Albanian Piano music.
This is a disc for those who want to hear how a pianist-composer developed from
the earliest years. I await the ensuing discs with interest and anticipation.
Steve Arloff
Fanfare
July/August 2008
BEACH
4 Sketches. Mamma’s Waltz. Menuetto. Romanza.
Petite valse. Air and Variations. Valse-caprice. Ballad. Bal masque.
Children’s Carnival. 3 Morceaux caractéristiques
• Kirsten
Johnson (pn) •
GUILD 7317 (65:32)
Kirsten Johnson empathizes
completely with the refined femininity of Amy Beach’s exquisite,
fragrantly decorated piano pieces, and the album is enhanced by her
notes, lucidly and insightfully written from the pianist’s point of view.
Johnson reveals, for instance, that Amy’s husband would not allow her to
accept payment for her public performances, feeling that it was his
place to provide the family income. How times have changed! This, the
first installment of Gußild’s projected Beach Piano Music series,
concentrates on the works of her early years, from her first simple
creation, Mamma’s Waltz
, composed in her head at the age of four and
written down for her by her mother, to her compositions of 1894, a
particularly fertile year.
The collection includes four
other junior pieces written between 1872 and 1878 (Amy was born in 1867)
demonstrating her evolving confidence and talent:
Menuetto (a
precursor of her Menuet italien
), Romanza,
and Air and
Variations , all written when she was just
10 in 1877; the relatively complex Air
and Variations being the most substantial
and accomplished. Her charming Petite
valse was written in the following year.
The capricious and rhapsodic Valse
caprice was premiered by Beach herself in
1889, and championed by Joseph Hofmann who favored it as an encore. In
1894 came the remarkable, nine-and-a-half minute
Ballade , based on
her own song, O my luve is like a red,
red rose to Robert Burns’s verses. This
lovely piece builds into a fiery, tempestuous climax, most passionately
conveyed by Johnson at the poet’s declaration of everlasting love: “I
will love thee still, my dear/While the sands of life shall run.”
Bal masque, also
composed in 1894, demonstrates Beach’s love and affinity for the
Viennese waltz tradition.
The remaining items in this
concert are grouped into three sets.
Sketches was written after Amy’s marriage
to Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885, and published in 1892 as her op.
15. Influences of Schumann, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Liszt are all
discernible. This set comprises four pieces, each of which is preceded
by a line of poetry, written in French. “In Autumn” has the
superscription, “Yellowed leaves are scattered on the grass”; it is a
little Schubert-like and it nicely evokes leaves lightly falling and
then swirling as breezes intensify. The ballet-like “Phantoms,” with
“All the fragile flowers die as soon as they are born,” has a
mazurka-like feel about it. The intensely romantic “Dreaming,” with its
quotation “You speak to me from the depths of a dream,” has an obsessive
triplet figuration and speaks of tender yearning. Finally, “Fire-flies,”
headed by “To be born with the spring, to die with the roses,” nicely
evokes the quickly flitting creatures and was played by Busoni, Hofmann,
and Moritz Rosenthal. Six pedagogical pieces comprise
Children’s Carnival
from the fruitful year, 1894. They are all
charming and accessible miniatures based on the Italian
commedia dell’arte
characters. “Promenade” introduces the characters. “Columbine” is a coy,
demure little sketch; “Pantalon” is spry and a little pompous; “Pierrot
and Pierrette” is a gentle waltz for the lovers, Pierrot constant,
Columbine fickle; “Secrets” is a lovely, haunting andantino; and “Harlequin,”
the acrobat of the troupe, is given an energetic dance full of leaps.
The album concludes with the three more sophisticated pieces that make
up Trois morceaux caractéristiques
(once again, 1894). “Barcorolle” is an exquisite
boat song, lilting and romantic, reaching a passionate climax. “Menuet
italien” expands Beach’s earlier Menuetto,
adding refinement and decorative
complexity. Finally, “Dance des fleurs” is a graceful evocation of
flowers nodding and twirling in the breeze.
With this new Guild release,
Kirsten Johnson’s survey of Amy Beach’s piano music begins auspiciously.
Joanne Polk’s three Arabesque albums of Beach’s piano music are also a
firm recommendation. Ian Lace
MusicWeb International Wednesday August 06 2008
Amy BEACH
(1867-1944)
Piano Music Volume 1 – The Early Works
Sketches Op.15 (1892) [12:38]
Mamma’s Waltz (1872) [2:01]
Menuetto (1877) [1:28]
Romanza (1877) [1:33]
Petite Valse (1878) [1:36]
Air and Variations (1877) [3:47]
Valse Caprice Op.4 [5:09]
Ballade Op.6 [9:21]
Bal Masque Op.22 [3:37]
Children’s Carnival Op.25 (1894) [10:18]
Trois morceaux caractéristiques Op.28 (1894) [12:56]
Kirsten Johnson (piano)
rec. St George’s, Bristol, April 2007
GUILD GMCD 7317 [65:32]
This is the first volume in a new survey of Amy Beach’s piano music. Expatriate
American pianist Kirsten Johnson now lives in England and has written her own
fine notes. In this volume she pitches in with some Beach juvenilia and adds two
rather more substantial works, Children’s Carnival Op.25 and Trois
morceaux caractéristiques Op.28 both written in 1894.
Given that much here is of slight musical value things depend largely on the
imaginative and sympathetic approach of the interpreter. Johnson proves a
valuable guide in the series of rather generic waltz and dance pieces that Beach
wrote when she was an ambitious ten year old. There’s even Mama’s Waltz written
when the composer was five! Elsewhere the picture postcard and Schumann-flecked
influences are never far away.
It’s when we come to the more substantial fare that we can get a meatier grip on
things, even when – as in the case of Sketches Op.15 – the demands are not
bone-shaking, though they are allusively Schumannesque. The obvious comparison
here is with the multi-volume Arabesque set played by Joanne Polk and you should
consider my
review
of the three volumes that constitute the solo piano works in the light of this
Guild entrant. The two competing discs have in any case somewhat complementary
takes. Guild’s recorded sound is brighter and more immediate, Arabesque’s is
rather more veiled and recessed; the Guild is less warm but has greater clarity.
So speaking of the Sketches we find Johnson is the more forthright in In
Autumn whilst Polk plays more capriciously with rubati. Polk is decidedly
quicker in Dreaming, keeping the left hand figures more mobile whilst
Johnson establishes the mood suggested by the title more obviously. Conversely
in something like the vivacious Valse Caprice we find that it’s Johnson who
takes this in an intoxicating arc, whilst Polk holds back, establishing a sense
of "raising the curtain" in the introduction and then taking a less showy route
throughout. The Chopinesque ardour of the Op.6 Ballade is taken finely by both
players. – very little to choose between them, other than recorded sound.
In
the Trois morceaux caractéristiques Johnson is consistently quicker than Polk.
Johnson takes the more incisive direction, Polk the more languid and withdrawn –
especially true of the opening Barcarolle. In the main though Johnson is less
inclined to rubati than Polk, preferring a brisker, crisper approach.
Johnson has certainly opened her account with characterful and vital
performances. Engaging, clarified and buoyant they make a good foil for the more
introspective profile evinced by Polk.
Jonathan Woolf
Page revised Thursday December 04 2008
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