Fresh off a successful Rachmaninoff project, Duo Genova & Dimitrov turns to the American composer Amy Beach. Her compositional oeuvre marks a high point in the phase of consolidation experienced by U.S. art music between the Civil War and World War I. Amy Beach was not the first American woman who composed, nor the first to earn money with her compositions, but she created a stir in the music world by forging ahead into genres in which previously only men had garnered wide acclaim. However, it was above all the piano that was Amy Beach’s lifelong companion.

She honored her instrument with solo compositions in a total of twenty-six opus numbers distributed equally over her entire compositional career, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Even though her music for piano four hands and for two pianos is limited to a few compositions, they all attest to their author’s talent. The original version of Amy Beach’s Variations on Balkan Themes op. 60 is her most extensive composition for piano two hands and the one that is the most challenging in playing technique. At the same time, the variations represent one of her most significant endorsements of folk music.

REVIEWS:

Genova and Dimitrov perform this technically demanding and richly imagined music with enormous affection and flair, conjuring its atmospheres and textures seamlessly, as if with one mind. A must-hear album for all who want to explore Beach’s highly rewarding output.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Aglika Genova and Liuben Dimitrov are a polished duo, unfailingly musical, with an ensemble precision that sits well with their two superbly matched instruments. The disc, very well recorded, comes with an exhaustively detailed booklet and is a valuable addition to the Beach discography.

-- Gramophone

As a second generation Korean-American woman, violinist Dawn Wohn notes that it has not always been easy to relate to the world of classical music, which is still largely Euro- and male-centric. Since delving into the diverse world of female composers, I have felt much joy, connection, and ownership to the music that I perform. To be able to champion this repertoire feels unbounded— joyful and limitless. I am particularly excited to share this album, which celebrates the music of American women, as performed by two American women.

There is no denying that historically, female composers have faced challenges. Amy Beach was unable to take composition lessons or have a performing career for most of her life, as it was deemed improper for a married woman. The two Black composers on this album, Dorothy Rudd Moore and Irene Britton Smith, faced further struggles for widespread recognition during their lifetimes, due to the classical world’s long reluctance to admit works by minority composers into the performing canon.

In an ideal world, there would be no need to call attention to the race or gender of these composers. In doing so, my concern is that the composers or their works will be overshadowed or grouped together by those labels. Just as Moore cautioned against typecasting, stating that “there are many Black artists in all disciplines and each is an individual with his or her unique experiences,” it is important to listen to and recognize each composer as an individual.

However, an all-male composer program would not raise questions on how to present it without diminishing the music or pigeon- holing the music or the composers. So, with this album, I choose to amplify and celebrate music by these four composers and all they have created through adversity. I relate deeply to the optimism, humor and beauty in these works, and hope that it inspires the listener.

REVIEW:

The two artists play with passion and elegantly the music of four composers defined not by gender or ethnicity but by the kind of tenacity that helped them achieve the often seemingly unreachable acceptance of the music establishment. Highly recommended!

-- All About the Arts (Rafael de Acha)

This was my first encounter with the music of Amy Beach, an American pianist and composer of the early 1900s. I was thunderstruck by it. I asked fellow European and American musicians, pianists, conductors, soloists and musicologists who gravitate around my Theater (Teatro alla Scala, Milano) if they had any information on her, but to no avail. No one knew her. Some had heard her name, but no one had actually listened to her compositions. Today I can say that Amy Beach is almost unknown in America. I can also say that she is unknown in Europe, given the caliber of the musicians I talked to about her, and the fact that they hadn’t heard of her. Starting with manuscripts requested from the University of New Hampshire, I began transcribing four pieces and a sonata, originally written for Violin and Cello and Piano, into a version for Viola and Piano. I discovered that, not only the music, but also the incredible life of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach (that is how she signed her compositions) is a beautiful novel that remained locked in a drawer all this time. In fact, I have every intention of reopening that drawer through this CD and through the musical edition that printed my transcriptions for Viola and Piano. I believe that the instrument of the Viola and its alto key have given a new color to this music, enhancing it, but never altering its true essence. Born with this CD is a project of popularization and knowledge of Amy Beach's compositions and life story, a story and music that are at once incredibly modern and of other times. Matteo Amadasi

After the great success of their first Solo Musica CD "Hymne à la Beauté", Sonja and Astrid Leutwyler this time recorded further discoveries for the special instrumentation of voice, violin and piano. A great enrichment of the trio with pianist Benjamin Engeli is cellist Benjamin Nyffenegger. In this second album "Secret Nights", better-known works contrast with rarities inspired by the mysteries of the night and nature. Carl Reinecke, who influenced early Romanticism with his intimate forms of expression, is represented with a small cycle. With Camille Saint-Saëns' song "Le bonheur est chose légère", French Romanticism makes itself heard. The central element of this concept album are works by female composers of the 19th century. Anyone who wanted to make her way as a female composer in past centuries had a hard time. It was not uncommon for women to be forbidden to make music and compose. After all, if it was a question of practising a profession in this field, it was considered unseemly, especially in the upper classes, for a woman of her status to want to earn money. In this new album, three female composers are represented with several works. With one exception, their poems set to music are by women poets. Amy Marcy Beach was the first American woman to compose a symphony. She was also a highly talented autodidact who could sing 40 different melodies at the age of three and is represented here with several songs. Lili Boulanger is the younger sister of the world-famous music teacher Nadia Boulanger. In Lili's short life - she died at the age of 24 - she wrote a total of 50 compositions. Her sensitive Nocturne can also be heard on this CD "Secret Nights".

Solungga Liu has been acclaimed as a pianist of great breadth. She is a champion of early twentieth-century American music and underrepresented works of the standard repertoire. She is also known as an uncanny interpreter of new music. The American Record Guide described her recording “The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan: Piano Works of Charles Tomlinson Griffes” for Centaur Records, as having, “excellent sound, sensitivity and beguiling color,” to which the Seattle Post-Intelligencer added, “This is an excellent recording. Liu has done justice to this sometime overlooked body of work with her playing, as she pays tribute to a unique and evocative composer.”

One of them was, according to contemporaries, a veritable child prodigy of Mozartian dimensions, the other was described by her friend Edvard Grieg as "one of his favorites" after her early death. There must have been two very special women whose works present in their latest publication by Miriam Terragni and Catherine Sarasin - The highly talented Amy Beach grew up in the USA and later made extensive tours also through Europe in addition to her work as a composer, Amanda Maier-Röntgen settled with her husband in Amsterdam after studies in Stockholm and Leipzig, where she managed a very active musical house. In the Romantic period, works for the flute were almost as rare as women composers, and the flute had fallen out of fashion as a solo instrument. Entirely unjustly, the Swiss duo thinks, and so they repeatedly take works for the violin as the basis for arrangements. In the case of these two sonatas, an extremely worthwhile project!

It is difficult to imagine a more touching sound than the gentle voice of a cello accompanied by the sweet tones of a Spanish guitar. In fact, for Nicole Peña Comas and Damien Lancelle, these two instruments sound so amorous together that they require an entire album to express all facets of love: passion, tenderness and lust, the burning desire of new lovers and affection for friends and family. Masterpieces by Tchaikovsky, Liszt or Robert Schumann as well as undiscovered treasures by August Nölck or Amy Beach have been selected and arranged for cello and guitar because they all set love to music.

Classical Music

Amy Beach (1873-1942) was probably the first woman composer to gain attention for writing successfully in the large forms of the nineteenth century: symphony, concerto, oratorio and chamber music. But it is in her songs and solo piano music that we glimpse a more private and intimate Beach. Beach produced more than 120 songs, only a few of which are known to the general public. This superb CD presents 22 of Beach’s finest songs, a selection which ranges from some of her earliest published efforts through her later brooding masterpieces. American baritone Patrick Mason is accompanied on this recording by leading Beach specialist, pianist Joanne Polk. Together, Mason and Polk’s penetrating interpretations make an excellent case for these songs as major English language song literature.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was not only one of the greatest and most important of the German poets, but without doubt also the one whose lyrics were most frequently set to music. The album “Goethe Project” by the German soprano Ute Ziemer and pianist Hiroko Imai provides a lasting impression of the diversity of composers who used Goethe's works as the basis for songs. In addition to popular composers such as Schumann, Grieg, Schubert, Verdi, Strauss, Wolf or Wagner, there are also barely performed works by Amy Beach, Johann Xaver Sterkel, Fanny Hensel, Josephine Lang, Anton Webern or Alban Berg. Even to this day, Goethe continues to fascinate composers as a poet, as shown by the songs dedicated to Ute Ziemer by Enjott Schneider (*1950), Dorothea Hofmann (*1961) and Johannes Martin Kränzle (*1962), which were recorded for the first time for this album.

Amy Beach's songs are pleasant enough, and certainly well-crafted, with smartly chosen texts--Burns, Longfellow, Browning, Shelley, and some lesser-known poets, including Beach herself. But most of their appeal lies with the composer's deftness in borrowing from and incorporating the styles of major artists such as Schubert, Brahms, Wolf, Richard Strauss, and Debussy into her writing. She even takes directly from Beethoven in her quite lovely song "The Rainy Day". In other words, there's nothing really original here, but melodically and in terms of overall accessibility and singability, Beach understood the genre and knew how to create music that nearly everyone--singers as well as listeners--could enjoy. There are lullabies, German lied, and French chansons, as well as a nod or two to English and American parlor-song. And we're fortunate to have as our interpreter a singer who is one of the world's experts in this repertoire: mezzo-soprano Katherine Kelton did her doctoral dissertation on Beach's songs. She exhibits a voice of rich color and easy, inviting expressiveness, and her technique effortlessly conveys the varied moods and cleverly imitative styles so that we can just sit back and appreciate each one of these charming if not particularly profound works. Beach's piano accompaniments are carefully thought-out and add essential, characterful aspects of tone, color, and texture that are often very technically challenging. Catherine Bringerud is completely at home with this music and at one with Kelton's vocal interpretations. The sound is complementary to vocal and instrumental timbres and presents the performances in realistic perspective. Fans of American song--and especially of Amy Beach (who did much of her writing just down the road from where I'm writing this review, at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH)--shouldn't miss this interpretively considerate, solidly performed recital.

--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

If you're having only one Amy Beach CD (and you should have at least one), let this be your choice. It's a mystery why the Piano Concerto still awaits the attention it surely deserves, for it's a terrific piece, full of good tunes, flashy keyboard writing, and colorful orchestration. It's also very well constructed, with the long (17-plus minutes) first movement effectively balanced by the three ensuing ones. The "perpetuum mobile" scherzo is delightful; the Largo, with its quasi-Wagnerian opening, is surprisingly expressive for all its brevity; and the finale has irresistible verve. The only previous recording of note was an unsatisfactory version on Vox, which this newcomer blows away. Alan Feinberg certainly has the chops for the piece, and tosses off the trickier moments with uninhibited abandon. However, for some inexplicable reason he's given a very wiry, brittle sounding instrument (excellently balanced, though) with a real "twang" in its middle register (happily the top of the keyboard sounds much better). That strange caveat aside, this is now the version of choice.


The "Gaelic" Symphony comes off equally well. As always with this orchestra, the strings are especially rich-toned and a joy to hear. In the final analysis, there's not much difference between this performance and Järvi's on Chandos, save for the fact that conductor Kenneth Schermerhorn takes a little more time over the slow movement and finale, which is all to the good. Again, we can only admire Beach's command of the orchestra, her free and easy use of the brass, and the way she keeps the music moving along smartly. This may not be a "great" work in the manner of Dvorák's "New World" Symphony, which inspired it, but it's certainly a very enjoyable one, and like the Piano Concerto it deserves to be heard more often. All in all, a very highly recommendable disc, finely recorded.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com