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Summer Dreams - American Piano Duets / Abbate, Perkins
Brilliant Classics

Summer Dreams - American Piano Duets / Abbate, Perkins

Modern Melancholic Romantic Dramatic Nostalgic
$14.99

Details

Composer
Samuel Barber, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell
Artist
Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
Format
CD
Label
Brilliant Classics
Released
Mar 15, 2024
Catalog #
BRI97118
UPC
5028421971186

About

Both Beach and MacDowell were formidably accomplished pianists who wrote concertos in barnstorming virtuoso style, for themselves and their contemporaries to play, but they could also turn their hand to the lucrative domestic market for piano-duet music. In doing so they also tapped into the 19th-century, Romantic preoccupation with childhood which Schumann had encapsulated in his Kinderszenen of 1838.

MacDowell wrote his Moon-Pictures Op. 21 in the winter of 1884–5 and subtitled them ‘after H.C. Andersen’s Picture-Book without Pictures’, referring to an 1848 collection of short bedtime stories.

Published in 1901 and dedicated to the composer’s niece, the six duets of the album’s title collection, Summer Dreams by Beach, are shorter and technically simpler than the Moon-Pictures, but they are prefaced by literary quotations which once more indicate that this is not music for children so much as music for adults to play to children, and for adults to play at being children. In any case, simpler means and fewer notes need hardly imply naivety of expression, and Beach’s self-taught technique was too rigorous to allow anything less than the most deftly fashioned work to escape her desk.

Composed in 1883, Beach’s brief 3 Movements for piano duet are the work of a prodigiously talented teenager who knows her early-Romantic piano literature – including Kinderszenen – inside out, but who also understands at this stage how to emulate rather than merely copy her models.

In the following year of 1884, the 23-year-old MacDowell wrote his 3 Poems Op. 20. Strictly speaking, Hamlet and Ophelia is the outlier in this collection, since MacDowell composed it in 1894 as a tone-poem for orchestra in the Lisztian manner, and then made this two-piano transcription rather than leaving the work to the kind of professional arranger habitually commissioned by publishers for such work. Nevertheless, he took the kind of care over it that Brahms did in arranging his symphonies, and the piano-duet version retains the brooding tension of the opening and effectively transfers the violinistic surges of Hamlet’s main section to the keyboard.

The album’s final collection takes a chronological leap forward to 1952, but its nostalgia-drenched mood belongs to an intermediate age. ‘One might imagine a divertissement in a setting of the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel’, Barber explained in a letter to his publisher, ‘the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos. Souvenirs – remembered with affection, not in irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness.’ Barber, it should be noted, would have been four years old at the time, and so these are ‘souvenirs’ in the manner of sepia-tinted postcards.

Tracklist 25 tracks

  1. 1 No. 1. Night by the Sea 04:25
    Track
    1
    Title
    No. 1. Night by the Sea
    Duration
    04:25
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  2. 2 No. 2. A Tale from Knightly Times 03:25
    Track
    2
    Title
    No. 2. A Tale from Knightly Times
    Duration
    03:25
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  3. 3 No. 3. Ballad 03:30
    Track
    3
    Title
    No. 3. Ballad
    Duration
    03:30
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  4. 4 I. The Hindoo Maiden 02:21
    Track
    4
    Title
    I. The Hindoo Maiden
    Duration
    02:21
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  5. 5 II. Story of the Stork 01:38
    Track
    5
    Title
    II. Story of the Stork
    Duration
    01:38
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  6. 6 III. In the Tyrol 03:33
    Track
    6
    Title
    III. In the Tyrol
    Duration
    03:33
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  7. 7 IV. The Swan 02:53
    Track
    7
    Title
    IV. The Swan
    Duration
    02:53
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  8. 8 V. Visit of the Bears 01:41
    Track
    8
    Title
    V. Visit of the Bears
    Duration
    01:41
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  9. 9 Hamlet 07:09
    Track
    9
    Title
    Hamlet
    Duration
    07:09
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  10. 10 Ophelia 06:22
    Track
    10
    Title
    Ophelia
    Duration
    06:22
    Composer
    Edward MacDowell
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  11. 11 No. 1. Allegro Appassionato 01:42
    Track
    11
    Title
    No. 1. Allegro Appassionato
    Duration
    01:42
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  12. 12 No. 2. Moderato 02:53
    Track
    12
    Title
    No. 2. Moderato
    Duration
    02:53
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  13. 13 No. 3. Allegro con fuoco 03:33
    Track
    13
    Title
    No. 3. Allegro con fuoco
    Duration
    03:33
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  14. 14 I. The Brownies 03:27
    Track
    14
    Title
    I. The Brownies
    Duration
    03:27
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Justine Marler, Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  15. 15 II. Robin Redbreast 01:48
    Track
    15
    Title
    II. Robin Redbreast
    Duration
    01:48
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Justine Marler, Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  16. 16 III. Twilight 02:16
    Track
    16
    Title
    III. Twilight
    Duration
    02:16
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Justine Marler, Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  17. 17 IV. Katy-dids 00:53
    Track
    17
    Title
    IV. Katy-dids
    Duration
    00:53
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Justine Marler, Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  18. 18 V. Elfin Tarantelle 01:51
    Track
    18
    Title
    V. Elfin Tarantelle
    Duration
    01:51
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Justine Marler, Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  19. 19 VI. Good night 03:36
    Track
    19
    Title
    VI. Good night
    Duration
    03:36
    Composer
    Amy Beach
    Performer
    Justine Marler, Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  20. 20 I. Waltz 04:13
    Track
    20
    Title
    I. Waltz
    Duration
    04:13
    Composer
    Samuel Barber
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  21. 21 II. Schottische 02:36
    Track
    21
    Title
    II. Schottische
    Duration
    02:36
    Composer
    Samuel Barber
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  22. 22 III. Pas de deux 03:53
    Track
    22
    Title
    III. Pas de deux
    Duration
    03:53
    Composer
    Samuel Barber
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  23. 23 IV. Two-Step 01:46
    Track
    23
    Title
    IV. Two-Step
    Duration
    01:46
    Composer
    Samuel Barber
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  24. 24 V. Hesitation-Tango 03:46
    Track
    24
    Title
    V. Hesitation-Tango
    Duration
    03:46
    Composer
    Samuel Barber
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins
  25. 25 VI. Galop 02:57
    Track
    25
    Title
    VI. Galop
    Duration
    02:57
    Composer
    Samuel Barber
    Performer
    Emma Abbate, Julian Perkins