Isata Kanneh-Mason SUMMERTIME

 

SUMMERTIME

Lucie Bartholomäi / Verena Louis FEMALE

 

FEMALE

 

Gould Piano Trio CLARKE - IVES - BEACH

 

CLARKE - IVES - BEACH

 

Hiroko Ishimoto PIONEERS

PIONEERS

 

Takács Quartet / Garrick Ohlsson ELGAR & BEACH Piano Quintets

PIANO QUINTETS

Tasmin Little THE BEST OF TASMIN

THE BEST OF TASMIN

Tasmin Little / John Lenehan CLARA SCHUMANN - DAME ETHEL SMYTH - AMY BEACH

The renowned violinist and exclusive Chandos artist Tasmin Little returns with a line-up of three women composers whose lives share some features but also significant differences that illustrate the complex lives of female musicians.

Clara Schumann, Dame Ethel Smyth, and Amy Beach all came from families that encouraged their musical interests but balked, in varying degrees, at professional training and engagement. All three composers draw on the influence of Robert Schumann and Brahms; Beach and Smyth, in particular, were fond of metrical and motivic manipulation.

Tasmin Little plays this music, so close to her heart, with her usual warmth and dexterity. The manuscript of Clara Schumann’s final chamber work, Three Romances, declares it ‘for piano and violin’, an ordering reflected in the relative complexity of the parts, the florid passagework here played beautifully by Little’s long-term collaborator, John Lenehan.

Shani Diluka ROAD 66

Diluka brings appreciable nuance and delicacy to Adams’s China Gates and Beach’s Young Birches, and infuses the churning minimalist patterns of Glass’s Etude No 9 with more dynamic and colouristic range than one often hears from so-called contemporary music specialists. In most lyrical pieces, however, softer dynamics often recede and wilt to the point of fading away, especially when Diluka makes diminuendos. You hear this in the two Bernstein Anniversaries, Ginastera’s ‘Danza de la moza donosa’ and Grainger’s gorgeous transcription of Gershwin’s ‘Love walked in’. Her spineless performance of Copland’s Piano Blues No 1 lacks the sinew and projection heard from Leo Smit, the work’s dedicatee, although such a style befits Hyung-ki Joo’s noodly, shapeless Chandeliers. 

However, Diluka’s faster-than-usual tempo for Cage’s In a Landscape rescues this music from its usual frozen dream state. Her enervated, flaccid approach to Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans is alien to these jazz icons in both spirit and letter; in fact she misreads Waltz for Debby’s fourth-to-last chord. But Diluka plays the piano part to Raphaël Merlin’s brilliant, harmonically imaginative arrangement of Cole Porter’s ‘What is this thing called love’ gorgeously, abetted by special guest Natalie Dessay’s sultry singing. Had the two paired up for an entire CD’s worth of Merlin-arranged standards, I would have stayed up all night behind the wheel to listen, rather than squirming in the back seat to the tune of ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet?’ (Jed Distler / Gramophone)