Women Composers – Page 2

9 Female Composers from 3 Centuries

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Some time ago I reviewed Wiener Urtext Edition’s Urtext Primo series of six books, each bringing together the music of three composers whose careers overlapped, two well known, the third less performed today. You can read my series review here.

These are serious editions suitable for late intermediate to early advanced players who want to explore key repertoire in a broader musical context, and some of the adult learners I work with have certainly found them rewarding.

Wiener Urtext now bring a seventh volume to the series. 9 Female Composers from 3 Centuries has a self-explanatory title, and is a natural expansion of a series that already shines a spotlight on the music of overlooked composers of the past. This latest collection offers authoritative new editions of 25 pieces, as always edited and with practice tips by Nils Franke.

There has of course been a spate of new collections of music composed by women composers, all of which I have praised in reviews here, and which between them have nicely filled a gap in our repertoire and historical understanding.

I am told these books have only been a modest success, however, which raises intriguing questions about whether publishing agendas and perceptions of the market match the unaffected musical appetites of players. As I look at this new collection let’s not only consider the intrinsic value of the publication itself, but whether and what it can add to this increasingly crowded market…

Piano Music by Women Composers

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

After several decades in which music by women composers was largely overlooked by those compiling piano anthologies, concert programmes, exam and festival lists, the recent renaissance of interest can be warmly welcomed as a necessary recalibration, and one which continues to bring to light many wonderful treasures.

Gail Smith’s pioneering Women Composers in History anthology (2013, Hal Leonard, available here) paved the way for more recent collections from Melanie Spanswick (reviewed here) and Karen Marshall (reviewed here). These ‘voices in the wilderness’ certainly piqued our interest, introducing piano enthusiasts to many names that we had been unaware of.

If those collections were the harbingers of change, two new anthologies compiled by Immanuela Gruenberg (again published by Hal Leonard) deliver a confident musical consummation of that promise, a tour de force of truly stunning classics.

Delivered with mature confidence and polished professionalism for a mass global market, these slick collections herald a watershed moment. Join me as I discover Piano Music by Women Composers…

Women Composers: A Graded Anthology

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Hot on the heels of Karen Marshall’s lovingly curated HerStory from Faber Music, which I recently reviewed here, Schott Music bring us three brilliantly compiled and vividly presented collections of music by neglected female composers past and present.

Melanie Spanswick’s Women Composers: A Graded Anthology is equally as groundbreaking, and being a larger series these books offer space to a wider and more diverse range of repertoire, particularly in their inclusion of playful jazz and 20th century piano works.

It is interesting to note that of the 30 works in Marshall’s book and the 52 more here, not only are there no actual duplicates, but few of the composers themselves appear twice, an extraordinary confirmation (were it needed) that the pool of neglected music by female composers is a deep one indeed.

So let’s cast an eye over Spanswick’s series…

HerStory: The Piano Collection

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Best-selling author Karen Marshall has been a driving force behind some of the most popular and useful piano education titles of recent years, including the Piano Star and Encore series (both ABRSM), Get Set! Piano method books (Collins Music) and Piano Trainer series (Faber Music).

To get the measure of this achievement, you can browse and read all of my previous reviews of Marshall’s work by clicking on this tag.

Marshall’s latest project is HerStory from Faber Music, and will appeal to a wider catchment of piano players beyond the education market, being a compilation of 30 works by female composers who thus far have not received the recognition they have deserved. But HerStory is so much more than simply another repertoire collection, as I will explain in this review.

Piano Music of Amy Beach

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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American composer Amy Beach’s significant contribution to the solo piano repertoire is finally beginning to receive the recognition and popularity it rightly deserves.

Beach (1867-1944) remained a hugely committed and prolific composer, even though much of her output received little attention in the first half of her career.

Her music is avowedly conservative, doing little to advance on the language of the early Romantic era composers, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt. And yet there is certainly a timelessness to its appeal that continues to speak to audiences and connect with players.

Hal Leonard’s 2013 publication Piano Music of Amy Beach offers an enticing introduction to this important composer’s work, and has recently been reprinted (in part because it is a core text for America’s National Federation of Music Clubs Junior Festivals programme for 2020-24).

The collection offers ten intermediate to advanced solo pieces selected from across Beach’s long career by Gail Smith. Let’s take a look…

Bacewicz: Children’s Suite

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) is at last gaining the recognition she deserves as one of the great composers of the mid-twentieth century, her towering Second Sonata rightly applauded as one of the significant piano masterpieces of the last century.

Among the composer’s many smaller-scale piano works the Suita dziecięca or Children’s Suite is a delightful highlight, its eight charming miniatures for the late-intermediate pianist a fascinating progression from the educational piano music of Bartók, Kabalevsky and Prokofiev, whose popular Musiques d’enfants reviewed here appeared just one year after Bacewicz’s Suite.

Poland’s major publishing house Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, PWM Edition, have recently delivered a delightful new edition of the work, edited by Monika Dziurawiec and with a gorgeous cover design by Joanna Rusinek.

Let’s look at this new publication and delve into the imaginative pianism of Bacewicz, not least because this important work surely deserves a place within the core pedagogic repertoire that every piano teacher should try to be aware of…

The Piano Music of Otilie Suková

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Otilie Suková was the daughter of Antonín Dvořák and aged 20 she became the wife of the composer Josef Suk.

A gifted musician, she played the piano and wrote several compositions of her own, inspired by her musical surroundings. Four of her piano pieces have survived; three were published in her lifetime, a fourth ‘To Dear Daddy’ has never previously been published.

Now Bärenreiter have produced a typically gorgeous urtext edition of the four pieces, edited by Eva Prchalová.

I’ve been playing them, and they are lovely. Here’s my review…