The famous Rarities of Piano Music from Husum When Peter Froundjian conceived a festival devoted exclusively to unknown and rarely played piano music, some might have thought the idea too ambitious or even foolhardy. It proved to be a stroke of genius, and since 1987 the strong support of audiences from many countries has been consistent. It has kept it's intimate atmosphere, with a maximum of 130 listeners in the Rittersaal of Husum castle, and 40 more beyond an open door, with a TV screen to keep in touch. It's influence around the world has been considerable, with more ambitious concert programmes in evidence and record companies willing to take on a wider repertoire. This disc contains a particularly large number of short pieces by ten different composers. However, the producers have arranged them thoughtfully into groups and sequences which should make for a coherent listening experience. If these examples encourage listeners to seek out other examples of music by the composers, then they have surely served their purpose. As usual Peter Froundjian made the initial choice of music, with the agreement of the performers. His co-producer Jesper Buhl and the team at Danacord took care of the technicalside, including the final order of tracks and the maximum duration to suit most CD players - about 79 minutes these days. The recordings are all taken from live performances with no editing. If the very noccasional 'noises off' can be heard, they only serve to show how quiet and concentrated the Husum audiences are most of the time.
This new release is a showcase of French masterworks by composers including Debussy, Ravel, and more. Kathleen Karr is the Principal Flutist of the Louisville Orchestra and Flute Professor at the University of Louisville. In 2012, she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Professor Award for the University of Louisville. At the University of Louisville, Kathleen teaches all applied flute students , flute ensemble, flute studio class, flute literature, flute pedagogy, chamber music coaching and performs with the faculty woodwind quintet. A frequent soloist with the Louisville Orchestra, Kathleen has most recently performed the Mozart G Major Flute Concerto with the Louisville Orchestra during the 2014-15 season. Kathleen has taught flute and chamber music at the Interlochen Arts Camp (Interlochen, Michigan), Bellarmine University, Centre College (Danville, Kentucky) and Indiana University Southeast. Dr. Denine LeBlanc teaches music in the Jefferson County Public School system where she has taught for over twenty-five years. From 1978 until its closure in the spring of 2020, she taught piano in the Community Music Program at the University of Louisville School of Music.
Belle Époque - French Music for Wind / Kolesnikov, Orsino Ensemble
Chandos
SACD
$21.99Apr 02, 2021
Under the leadership of its Artistic Director, Adam Walker, the Orsino Ensemble is a chamber group of flexible formation with five outstanding wind players at its core. Each is a leader in his or her field, the group’s members committed to showcasing the depth and versatility of the wind chamber repertoire. They expand and reduce the Ensemble’s format as needed across their different programmes. This flexible approach is clearly demonstrated on this their début recording for Chandos, programming works for solo instrument through to the full wind quintet and piano needed for Albert Roussel’s Divertissement. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bore witness to significant advances in the design and manufacture of wind instruments, much of the development driven by French makers. At the same time, the rapidly expanding Paris Conservatoire supported not only performance study, but also a vast output of original compositions by their teaching staff for the student body. The varied programme on this album captures the spirit of the age – a Belle Époque indeed!
REVIEW:
A delightful and thoughtful debut disc from the Orsino Ensemble. Supplemented by Pavel Kolesnikov’s insightful pianism, the Orsinos draw on its core quintet of leading wind players. The entire complement is heard only at the start of the disc in Roussel’s carefree Divertissement, the five wind players effortlessly interweaving, blending or stepping forward as appropriate.
This new release features works for solo piano by female composers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, performed by Anna Shelest. Hailed by The New York Times as a pianist of “a fiery sensibility and warm touch,” Anna Shelest is an international award-winning pianist who has thrilled audiences throughout the world. An “effective collaborator” (The New York Times), Anna made her orchestral debut at the age of twelve with the Kharkiv Symphony Orchestra, playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Since then she has been a soloist with some of the world’s finest orchestras, including the Montreal Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and Estonian National Symphony, among others. Born in Ukraine, she received her early music education at Kharkiv Special Music School. Since graduating from The Juilliard School with a Masters Degree in the class of Jerome Lowenthal, Anna has made her home in New York City with her husband and two sons.
Playing four-hands piano was both vital in the dissemination of music in the nineteenth century and also a popular domestic activity. The French composers recorded here span the Romantic century, from the salon charm of Chaminade and Massenet and the virtuosity of Alkan's wild dance to the innocence of the family music-room in pieces by Chausson, Godard and Ropartz. The original 1853 Parisian Erard piano on which this recording was made combines warmth with bell-like clarity, because of it's straight stringing, allowing it to produce a surprising variety of appealing, expressive textures.
Compositrices: A l'aube du XXe siecle / Hurel, Couvert
Alpha
CD
$20.99Jan 24, 2020
Juliette Hurel and Hélène Couvert, who have long enjoyed a close rapport on the concert platform and on disc, here celebrate five French women composers at the turn of the twentieth century. Countess Clémence de Grandval was the composer of some sixty songs, of which Saint-Saëns said: ‘They would certainly be famous if their composer did not have what many people regard as the irremediable defect of being a woman.’ Augusta Holmès earned the admiration of Liszt, Wagner and Saint-Saëns. To mark the Universal Exhibition of 1889, she composed a monumental work for more than a thousand musicians. During her studies at the Conservatoire, Mélanie Bonis fell madly in love with a singer, but had to marry a rich industrialist. She later returned to composition and used the pseudonym Mel Bonis, leaving her gender in doubt. Cécile Chaminade displayed extraordinary gifts at a very early age. Bizet called her ‘My little Mozart’. Lili Boulanger received her first music lessons from her sister, the famous teacher Nadia. In 1913, at the age of nineteen, she became the first woman to receive the Prix de Rome. The word ‘compositrice’ was born!
Each of the works on this recording was either composed by or inspired by a woman. We meet Cecile Chaminade (1857-1944) and her Concertino - 'a piece that has accompanied me for years and encapsulates her immense talent', says Mathilde Calderini; Claude Arrieu (1903-90), a pupil of Marguerite Long and Paul Dukas; Mel Bonis (1858-1937); and the young composer Lise Borel (b. 1993), whom Mathilde Calderini commissioned to write a piece entitled Miroir, which she premiered in 2023 with Aurele Marthan, the pianist on this recording and a longstanding artistic partner of hers. Debussy's famous nymph Syrinx and a transcription of his prelude La Fille aux cheveux de lin are also on the programme, as are his Six epigraphes antiques, inspired by the Chansons de Bilitis, named after an (entirely fictional) ancient poetess. Francis Poulenc's Sonata of 1957 is 'probably one of the most beautiful pieces ever written for flute and piano', according to the French flautist. The work was commissioned by the American pianist and philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who also did a great deal for such composers as Ravel, Stravinsky and Barber.
Her Story rather than "His Story": On her new GENUIN album, the remarkable Austrian pianist Mitra Kotte reexamines music history, placing women composers of the 19th and 20th centuries at the forefront. How many people truly know the works of Dora Pejacevic, Louise Farrenc, Cecile Chaminade, or Emilie Mayer as they deserve? Mitra Kotte, a prizewinner at international competitions, sheds light on a long-overlooked chapter of music. With great passion and the highest technical mastery, she introduces us to exquisite gems and profound works that leave us marveling both visually and aurally!
Rarities of Piano Music at "Schloss vor Husum" from the 2024
Danacord
CD
$18.99Nov 07, 2025
The famous Rarities of Piano Music from Husum: When Peter Froundjian conceived a festival devoted exclusively to unknown and rarely played piano music, some might have thought the idea too ambitious or even foolhardy. It proved to be a stroke of genius, and since 1987 the strong support of audiences from many countries has been consistent. It has kept it's intimate atmosphere, with a maximum of 130 listeners in the Rittersaal of Husum castle, and 40 more beyond an open door, with a TV screen to keep in touch. It's influence around the world has been considerable, with more ambitious concert programmes in evidence and record companies willing to take on a wider repertoire. This disc contains a particularly large number of short pieces by fourteen different composers. However, the producers have arranged them thoughtfully into groups and sequences which should make for a coherent listening experience. If these examples encourage listeners to seek out other examples of music by the composers, then they have surely served their purpose. As usual Peter Froundjian made the initial choice of music, with the agreement of the performers. His co-producer Jesper Buhl and the team at Danacord took care of the technicalside, including the final order of tracks and the maximum duration to suit most CD players - about 80 minutes these days. The recordings are all taken from live performances with no editing. If the very occasional "noises off" can be heard, they only serve to show how quiet and concentrated the Husum audie ces are most of the time.
Beyond Debussy and Ravel: the world of the French piano in all it's dazzling variety, and in critically acclaimed recent recordings. Beyond a sensitivity to tone colour, very little unifies this eclectic list of French composers, who flourished from the end of the Romantic era into our own time. To move from the deft sketches of Reynaldo Hahn's Le Rossignol eperdu, and the scented harmonies of Benjamin Godard's Op.58 cycle of 20 Pieces, to the introverted gloom of Les Heures dolented by Gabriel eduard Xavier Dupont and the four-movement Solitude by Louis Vierne, and from the dense, Wagnerian counterpoint of sonatas by Vincent D'Indy and Paul Dukas, to the restless but crystalline textures of the early Sonata by Henri Dutilleux, is to stop off at quite different stations on a map of creative work full of destinations as distinct as any to be found on the Paris Metro. Critics have recognised that each of the artists involved has invested intellectual energy as well as technical mastery in immersing themselves within these individual worlds and personalities. Mark Viner captures Chaminade the poet beyond and further than the salon composer of repute, as well as measuring up to Alkan at his most surprisingly charming in some of the Etudes Op.35. Emanuele Torquati lends a more romantic sensibility to Roussel than we tend to associate with him, while Sofia Andreoli shows that there is an impressionist side to Magnard beyond the densely worked chromaticism of his symphonies and cantatas.
Pianist Antonio Oyarzabal continues to show us in this album that a multitude of female composers, who deserve to be known and recognized, still remain forgotten. On this occasion, he offers us a selection of pieces by 18 unique authors, most of them pianists, from different periods and geographical origins. In all cases, their professional development was hindered by their status as women and by the social pressure of the historical period in which they lived. Oyarzabal finds intense and authentic artistic stimulation in the process of researching their career paths and in the enthusiastic interpretation of their music. This second part of “La Muse Oubliée” does not intend to bring any sort of closure. On the contrary, it represents the continuation of a project as large as the number of female composers who have yet to be included…
This album, Throwback to Dance, explores how composers turn to dance forms to carve out new paths: predominantly court dances, folk dances but also the more 'modern' waltz. The album is inspired by the charming meeting between Ravel and Grieg back in 1894, and looks at Grieg's influence on Ravel, seldom documented, as well as that on Pejacevic and Chaminade.
Notre amour – Pieces for violoncello & piano / Gehweiler, Hengartner
Solo Musica
CD
$20.99Feb 02, 2024
The tradition of bringing out New Year publications on January 2, “Berchtold’s Day”, goes back as far as the 17th century. Societies andguilds provided printed books, illustrations or music to the young people of the city in return for a financial contribution, which went towards the heating of the society rooms. A 2005 CD of piano music by the Winterthur composer Johann Carl Eschmann, whose documents are held in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, marked the revival of the old tradition in a new guise.
The New Year release CD 2024 brings together works by six composers, male and female, all of whom except one were born and trained in French-speaking countries. Even Paul Juon had Romanic roots, since his grandfather had emigrated around 1830 from the Swiss canton of Grisons to Russia. Short pieces have been grouped around César Franck’s Sonata in A major: composed between 1880 and 1924, all – except Ernest Bloch’s three lieder movements From Jewish Life (1924), whose Judaistic timbre became Bloch’s trademark – conform to our present-day perception of a rhapsodic fin-de-siècle sound.
The cellist Isabel Gehweiler is a prizewinner of the European Bursary for Young Artists, the Art Prize of the Art Foundation of Baden-Württemberg, the Art Prize of the Markgräfler region; she is also a recipient of grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Juilliard School of Music, the Rotary Foundation, the arteMusica Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Saarland region, the Richard Wagner Association, the Covid-19 Grant of the City of Zurich, the Notenstein La Roche Privatbank and the Vontobel Bank. As a composer, Isabel Gehweiler has produced a body of work encompassing chamber music and orchestral compositions, which are regularly performed at international festivals.
What would it mean to 'compose like a woman'? The present collection answers the question, in a literal sense, while undoing the premise on which the question was asked in the first place. In social and historical terms, it means enjoying privileges of upbringing, education, and/or wealth that were historically denied to the vast majority of women. It means, on the part of the women represented here, a single-minded determination in pursuit of their vocation, helping them to overcome prejudice and sexism in a cultural, social and political milieu that has consistently denied women the opportunity to find and express their own voice in music. Only with movements of emancipation in the last century, and much more rapidly in the last 50 years, has this situation begun to be addressed and corrected. What composing like a woman does not mean - as the music in this collection makes clear - is a definable set of qualities or characteristics to the music itself which would distinguish the work of female composers from the music composed by men.
This remarkable set gathers many individual recordings of music by women composers, which Brilliant Classics has quietly yet actively championed in their catalogue for decades, uniting it with exciting new outings, so that a comprehensive historical picture of the highly varied struggles and successes of women composers through the ages to our present time are chronicled and celebrated.
Other information:
- Recordings date from 1994-2024
- Booklet in English contains liner notes by Peter Quantrill
- The revival of interest in female classical composers reflects a growing recognition of their overlooked contributions to music history.
For centuries, women composers were marginalized, their works overshadowed by their male counterparts. However, recent efforts by musicians, scholars, and institutions have brought these composers into the spotlight, highlighting the richness and diversity of their compositions.
- This renewed focus stems from a broader movement toward inclusivity in the arts, challenging traditional narratives that have historically excluded women. The rise of feminist musicology has also played a key role, offering fresh perspectives on these composers' lives and works.
- This comprehensive box set offers a wide spectrum of works by female composers, from the Medieval mystic Hildegard Von Bingen (1098-1179), through the Renaissance Isabella Leonarda (baptized 1620-1704), Francesca Caccini (1587-1640) und Barbara Strozzi (baptized 1619-1677), traversing the Baroque and Classical eras, and arriving in the contemporary field, with composers such as Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) and Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969).
- A long due homage to the art and voice of female composers, spanning nearly a thousand years!
Hailed by the magazine BBC Music for it's 'generous and warm-hearted, utterly beguiling playing', the GRAMMY®-nominated Neave Trio has emerged as one of the finest young ensembles of it's generation. For this, their eighth album, they have once again selected a programme of works by female composers. Written in 1846, the Piano Trio of Clara Schumann was considered a great success by her friends and supporters (notably by Brahms) but her lack of self-confidence clouded her own view of the piece. Intellectually curious and a voracious reader from an early age, Dora Pejacevic was largely self-taught as a composer. She composed her first piano trio (in D major) in 1905 (when she was twenty) and the second followed in 1910, by which time Pejacevic's musical language had already evolved into it's distinctive late-romantic style. Chaminade's Piano Trio No. 2 in A minor was published 1887, with a dedication to the great French cellist Jules Delsart. The successful premiere had been given at the Salle Érard on 4 February 1886. Chaminade went on to play the A minor Trio regularly during the 1890s, to substantial critical acclaim.
The Future is Female, Vol. 3: At Play / Sarah Cahill
First Hand Records
CD
$21.99Apr 28, 2023
THE FUTURE is FEMALE is a three-volume series, which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day. These albums encompass 30 compositions by women from around the globe and include many new commissioned works and world première recordings. Most pianists grow up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of colour. It is still standard practise to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed.
Vol. 1, In Nature, and Vol. 2, The Dance were released in 2022 to much critical acclaim. American pianist Sarah Cahill, hailed as ‘a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde’ by The New York Times and ‘instrumental in bringing to life the music of many of our greatest living composers’ by Keyboard Magazine, has commissioned and premièred over 70 compositions for solo piano. She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music by the American Composers Forum.
Wilhelm Backhaus - The Complete Acoustic & Selected Early Electric Recordings
APR
CD
$32.99Nov 17, 2023
As one of the great pianists of the 20th century, WILHELM BACKHAUS (1884–1969) needs no introduction. He recorded almost continuously from 1908 until his death, but this set, focusing on his earliest recordings, completes APR’s coverage (see also APR 6026, APR 6027 and APR 5637) of all his solo and concerto output for The Gramophone Company/HMV, except the electrically recorded Brahms titles, which are available elsewhere. These early discs reveal Backhaus as an exciting young virtuoso, rather than the sober purveyor of German classics he was to become.
Shura Cherkassky - The Complete 78 RPM Recordings, 1923-1950
APR
CD
$32.99Nov 03, 2023
In his later years, SHURA CHERKASSKY (1909–1995) was regarded as one of the last ‘Romantics’ – a throwback to the so-called ‘golden age’ of pianism in the first decades of the 20th century. As a pupil of Josef Hofmann, he had an impeccable pedigree, but we tend to forget his long career meant he was already playing and recording in that ‘golden age’. Here then are these early recordings, complete for the first time, starting in the acoustic era with the young prodigy’s 1923 Victor discs. Much of the repertoire is unique in his discography, including his only recording of chamber music – the Rachmaninov cello sonata. The Tchaikovsky 2nd Concerto, Cherkassky’s earliest concerto recording, has never previously been reissued and reveals the 36-year-old artist at his virtuoso peak.
REVIEWS:
It is a joy to have all these recordings available together. Cherkassky was a supremely gifted and communicative pianist and there is something to admire in every piece in this collection.
-- MusicWeb International
Of special note are the many Chopin pieces and a smashing performance of the Fantasy in F minor from 1950. The latter has reasonably decent sound and gives us the opportunity of hearing what Cherkassky can do with one of Chopin’s masterworks.
Outstanding in-depth notes are supplied by Jonathan Summers, and special praise must be given to Seth B. Winner for his detail about restoration techniques. No lover of the art of the piano can afford to be without this set.
Olga Samaroff & Frank La Forge - Complete solo recordings
APR
CD
$21.99Jun 28, 2024
OLGA SAMAROFF (1880-1948) and FRANK LA FORGE (1879-1953) were amongst the earliest pianists to record for the US Victor label, both making most of their discs in the acoustic era before 1925. Though American, both went to Europe to study - Samaroff to the Paris Conservatoire and La Forge to Leschetizky in Vienna. Samaroff was the greater virtuoso, as can be heard in her famous recording of Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries', but after a fall, in 1926 she retired to an equally successful teaching career at the Juilliard School, her pupils including William Kapell, Raymond Lewenthal and Rosalyn Tureck amongst many others. La Forge gravitated towards accompanying and went on to record hundreds of discs for Victor in that capacity. His discs as soloist include some of the earliest attempts to record concerted works.
