Arabesque’s devotion
to the music of Amy Beach has been not
only of long-standing but also rewarding.
I’ve grouped together the three volumes
of the solo piano works, though Joanne
Polk reappears elsewhere in the series
as a chamber partner and to fine effect.
The three volumes range back and forth
across Beach’s compositional life each
one extracting some nugget from this
under-appreciated corpus of work and
leavening it with some of Beach’s fantasies,
paraphrases and transcriptions, all
of which round out a fuller picture
of her enthusiasms and musical influences.
The Variations on Balkan
Themes, which owes its origin to the
Macedonian-Turkish conflict of the time,
is a series of variations on four themes
with one of them making multiple reappearances.
She writes a proud and defiant Maestoso
complete with Lisztian flourish and
a discreetly effective Largo con molta
espressione. The powerful funeral march
never explores an especially complex
depth but she saves up the virtuosic
trajectory for the six-minute plus Cadenza
and finale where, after a torrent of
more Lisztian rhetoric, we end in contemplative
stillness. Beach, herself of course
a notable pianist, would have relished
the drama and the introversion of such
music and would have calculated the
effect accordingly. She gave the premiere
in Boston in 1905. Along with the Variations
we have lighter morceaux and some nature
studies perhaps more truly representative
of her. The Scottish Legend has an attractive
scotch snap but its opus companion,
the Gavotte fantastique, really glints
with whimsical fire and exploits the
keyboard for maximum effect (trills,
fast scales and the like). It’s no wonder
the piece held appeal to other pianists
– Olga Samaroff played it frequently
for instance.
Young Birches is laced
with impressionist intensity and A Humming
Bird is full of fluttering Ravelian
influence, whilst her transcription
of Far Awa’ shows another side – the
Gaelic and Celtic inheritance. Perhaps
the most concentratedly impressive of
the pieces in the first volume is Out
of the Depths, a Psalm setting written
c.1928 and published four years later.
Beach took Psalm 130 and in this realisation
of it she manages to evoke a declamatory
resolution, a stark and bleak intensity
and ultimately, through purely musical
means, a reconciliatory force. All most
impressive. Of the Trois morceaux caractéristiques
it’s the last that stays longest in
the memory: rhythmically lilting, lively,
variational and extremely clever.
The second volume opens
with another of Beach’s influences,
Chopin. This is the Valse-Caprice, her
Op.4 and one of the first of her own
works that she played in recital. From
Chopin to Liszt, whose influence was
to remain pervasive, at least in terms
of the technical resources of the keyboard.
He looms large in her Prelude and Fugue,
which was begun in 1912, especially
in the intense and brooding Prelude.
The same is true of the transcription
of her own songs - the Op.6 Ballad,
say – in which Lisztian rhetoric seems
to bear down too heavily on her. One
feels Beach more singularly alive in
something like A Hermit Thrush at Eve
with its ripple and naturalistic shadow
and gauze and its companion piece A
Hermit Thrush at Morn, which is laced
with imaginative expectation. As attractive,
maybe more complexly so, is A Cradle
Song of the Lonely Mother. This, for
all the wispy sounding sentimentality
of the title, is actually a highly chromatic
and dense setting. It includes spiralling
ascents to a trill and nascent depth
of feeling, the left hand on an unresolved
emotive quest – both hands indeed exploring
the furthermost extremes of emotive
meaning. Similarly there are some intriguingly
voiced reiterations of the melody in
The Fair Hills of Éiré,
O! that deserve rehearing. The second
volume ends with her Gallic Les Rêves
de Columbine: full of caprice and fancy,
character studies of finesse and old
fashioned charm – also expressive grandeur
and romantic tracery.
Fire-flies is the final
volume in the series of solo piano works
and ranges widely. The Four Sketches
are Schumannesque in impulse though
the piece that gives this disc its title
is more Chopin in orientation, an encore
pleaser. Her Fantasia fugata is a feline
and attractive one again though submerged
rather too deeply in Lisztian heroism
for overmuch individuality to emerge.
At the heart of this disc however sit
the Five Improvisations, her Op.148,
a very late set from 1938. This looks
back to Brahms whilst simultaneously
expanding her harmonic palette still
further through dissonance and an elliptical
sense of compression; hear the fourth
for her increasing sense of concision
and stillness. She utilises a Viennese
Waltz and the polonaise as well, all
the while binding them to her very individual
schema for these little, but by no means
uneventful, improvisations. This is
Beach at her late best. In the ebullient
Chopin-meets-Richard Strauss Tyrolean
Valse-fantasie, written just before
the outbreak of the First World War,
we have a perfect example of her contemporary
enthusiasms but it’s the early Eskimos
that render up richer rewards. They’re
certainly not at all advanced harmonically,
but they possess an attractive and lively
personality, as do the rippling arpeggios
of the first of From Grandmother’s Garden,
a set of five etudes, that keeps sentimentality
at bay through evocative mild dissonance
and feisty cross-rhythms.
These three volumes
have been recorded in a most sympathetic
acoustic. Joanne Polk proves herself
to be as idiomatic an interpreter as
could be imagined: subtle, nuanced,
technically adroit and entirely inside
the idiom. To the initiated where do
you start? I’d start with the First
Volume, move onto the Third and make
a special effort to hear A Hermit Thrush
at Eve and Morn from the Second. You’ll
be rewarded.
Jonathan Woolf
Joanne Polk (piano)