Hanni Liang: Voices for Solo Piano (Ethel Smyth; Errollyn Wallen; Eleanor Alberga; Sally Beamish; Chen Yi) (Delphian Information)
★★★★★
Ethel Smyth was a middle-class masculine lesbian from an English navy household who went to jail for the Suffragette trigger and was seen conducting fellow-inmates at Holloway Jail with a toothbrush. That, in sum, is the impression given by Thomas Beecham and different cautious admirers. Virginia Woolf as soon as mentioned that being cherished by Ethel was ‘like being caught by a large crab’. The composer’s daunting physicality occluded no matter advantage there was in her music, which pale out together with her loss of life in 1944.
Glyndebourne’s latest revival of her opera The Wreckers has been restorative and a number of other German opera homes have taken it up. So what subsequent?
Attempt the second piano sonata in C minor. Composed in 1877 in a flush of ardour for an operetta singer, the sonata inhabits a patch halfway between Schumann and Brahms, however with a robust sufficient presence to specific a spiky individuality. Smyth was 19 on the time, a scholar in Leipzig. The promise is there for all to listen to. That is fairly some sonata.
A set of variations in D main on ‘An Authentic Theme (of an Exceeding Dismal Nature)’, written a yr later, tells us that Smyth took herself no extra severely than needed. It’s a 20-minute suite of cocky facility that places the likes of Grieg and Tchaikovsky (whom she knew) firmly of their place. Not dismal in any respect: extra snarky and mocking of the stuffed male shirts across the dinner desk.
The conviction right here is blazed by pianist Hanni Liang, an academy instructor in Munich. Between and across the Smyth works, Liang performs 4 modernities, of which Sally Beamish’s Evening Dances is brilliantly evocative. The opposite items, extra quirky, are by Erollyn Wallen, Chen Yi and Eleanor Alberga. Not a uninteresting phrase amongst them.
The Delphian label, by the best way, is an Edinburgh indy with a knack for the sudden. You’d by no means hear a recital like this on Warner, Sony or the opposite classical codgers. 5 stars for initiative.
Evaluation written, I’m relistening now for pure pleasure.
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Norman Lebrecht is without doubt one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s an everyday presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Avenue Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.