Beach Chaminade

Hyperion's Romantic Piano Concerto series reaches its 70th album with this program of three concertos by women. The ongoing success of the series suggests that audiences are ready and waiting for wider repertoire, and pianist Danny Driver and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Rebecca Miller deliver a real find here. The Piano Concerto in C sharp minor, Op. 45, of American composer Amy Beach has been performed and recorded, but it's been in search of a recording that captures the autobiographical quality of the work, well sketched out in the booklet notes by Nigel Simeone. Essentially, Beach faced creative repression from her religious mother and to a lesser extent from her husband, who allowed her to compose, but only rarely to perform. These experiences, it may be said, poured out in this towering Brahmsian, four-movement piano concerto, which sets up an unusual quality of struggle between soloists and orchestra. It's this dynamic that's so well captured by Driver and Miller (who happen to be married to each other). Sample the opening movement, which has lacked this quality in earlier performances.

This fascinating collection of rare and distinctive piano works, from the 18th century to the present, is inspired by stories of how women composers created music while meeting the expectations of family and society. Hiroko Ishimoto brings together a remarkably varied programme including works by Ana Bon who was ‘chamber music virtuosa’ at the Prussian court of King Frederick the Great, the bold harmonies of Vítĕzslava Kaprálová (a student of Martinů), as well as pieces by Amy Beach based on the calls of the hermit thrush, and so much more.

Was the golden age of the piano that of a defeat for female composers? If they occupied an important place in ancient and baroque music, the bourgeois society which emerges from the Enlightenment limits their access to the conservatory and to the quarry. Marie-Catherine Girod explores this key moment and reveals to us the talent of the resistance fighters of the classical and romantic periods, and of the first modernism, those whose history has retained the name, such as Fanny Mendelssohn or Clara Schumann, or of whom she is rediscovering it today.

Was the golden age of the piano that of a defeat for female composers? If they occupied an important place in ancient and baroque music, the bourgeois society which emerges from the Enlightenment limits their access to the conservatory and to the quarry. Marie-Catherine Girod explores this key moment and reveals to us the talent of the resistance fighters of the classical and romantic periods, and of the first modernism, those whose history has retained the name, such as Fanny Mendelssohn or Clara Schumann, or of whom she is rediscovering it today.