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Beach: Piano Music / Martina Frezzotti
Piano Classics

Beach: Piano Music / Martina Frezzotti

Romantic Romantic Uplifting Nostalgic Triumphant
$21.99

Details

Composer
Amy Beach
Artist
Martina Frezzotti
Format
CD
Label
Piano Classics
Released
Nov 17, 2023
Catalog #
PCL10277
UPC
5029365102773

About

A wide-ranging introduction to the distinctive compositional voice of Amy Beach through her solo piano music, featuring both well-known and unfamiliar pieces. While Amy Beach is now among the best-known female composers of classical music history, her story becomes more remarkable as details of it are disseminated. The pianist Mark Viner introduces her life and music in a detailed but approachable essay to accompany this new recording of her piano music on Piano Classics. She was essentially self-taught, and a prodigy to match any previous celebrated male examples, at least in technica l terms. She translated Berlioz's treatise on orchestration in order to use it herself. She became a formidably accomplished pianist in her own right, but was then prevented from giving more than two recitals a year by her husband. Beach continued to compose, however, and steadly so through the last decade of the 19th century and well into the 20th. The earliest piece on Martina Frezzotti's recital is also one of her most familiar, the nocturne Dreaming from 1892, in which she emulates a Chopin model with piano writing that's deceptively simple on the page but uniquely haunting on the ear. The album's most substantial work is the 25-minute Variations on Balkan Themes, from 1904. The four themes in question were passed on to her by a missionary to the region, and the piece amounts to a proud cry for Serbian nationalism in the post-Lisztian style. Through it's course, Beach writes in the style of a barcarolle, a parlour waltz, a funeral march, a Hungarian dance and much more, weaving together her material with a sure hand. Beach's own skill as a pianist surely contributes to the soft tonal shades she conjures in her transcription of Richard Strauss's song Ständchen. She also explored the possibilities of making accurate musical transcriptions of birdsong decades before Olivier Messiaen did so, and her most celebrated work in this vein is the achingly beautiful Hermit-Thrush at Eve from 1922. Martina Frezzotti's album of Fanny Mendelssohn for Piano Classics (PCL10238) won enthusiastic praise from David Hurwitz on a video review for Classics Today. According to pianodao. Com (Andrew Eales), 'Frezzotti proves a brilliant advocate for these pieces in this recording, combining a poetic sensibility with the necessary weight and flair to showcase the more dazzling elements of Mendelssohn's piano writing. The recording is bright, reverberant and luminous.

Tracklist 12 tracks

  1. 1 Out of the Depths, Op. 130 02:44
    Track
    1
    Title
    Out of the Depths, Op. 130
    Duration
    02:44
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  2. 2 Variations on Balkan Themes, Op. 60 25:16
    Track
    2
    Title
    Variations on Balkan Themes, Op. 60
    Duration
    25:16
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  3. 3 4 Sketches, Op. 15: No. 3. Dreaming 04:28
    Track
    3
    Title
    4 Sketches, Op. 15: No. 3. Dreaming
    Duration
    04:28
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  4. 4 Serenade 03:49
    Track
    4
    Title
    Serenade
    Duration
    03:49
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  5. 5 Prelude and Fugue, Op. 81 10:32
    Track
    5
    Title
    Prelude and Fugue, Op. 81
    Duration
    10:32
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  6. 6 From Six to Twelve, Op. 119: No. 3. Canoeing 01:10
    Track
    6
    Title
    From Six to Twelve, Op. 119: No. 3. Canoeing
    Duration
    01:10
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  7. 7 From Grandmother's Garden, Op. 97: V. Honeysuckle 02:57
    Track
    7
    Title
    From Grandmother's Garden, Op. 97: V. Honeysuckle
    Duration
    02:57
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  8. 8 Hermit Thrush at Eve, Op. 92, No. 1 04:49
    Track
    8
    Title
    Hermit Thrush at Eve, Op. 92, No. 1
    Duration
    04:49
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  9. 9 Nocturne, Op. 107 03:45
    Track
    9
    Title
    Nocturne, Op. 107
    Duration
    03:45
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  10. 10 No. 1. A Peterborough Chipmunk 01:09
    Track
    10
    Title
    No. 1. A Peterborough Chipmunk
    Duration
    01:09
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  11. 11 No. 2. Young Birches 02:46
    Track
    11
    Title
    No. 2. Young Birches
    Duration
    02:46
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti
  12. 12 No. 3. A Humming Bird 01:02
    Track
    12
    Title
    No. 3. A Humming Bird
    Duration
    01:02
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Martina Frezzotti