Slowly, slowly, more and more of Amy Marcy Cheney Beach’s music is being rediscovered. The composer of more than 300 works (nearly all of which were published and performed during her lifetime), Beach also was a fine pianist who made her debut at age 16 and went on to solo with the Boston Symphony Orchestra when she was just 18 years old. This disc of Beach’s chamber music exemplifies not just her strong compositional voice but also demonstrates her close ties to her home state of New Hampshire and her adopted city of Boston.
The album’s centerpiece is the four-movement violin sonata from 1897, premiered by Franz Kneisel (the BSO’s concertmaster) and Beach herself. The sonata opens with a ghostly first theme for the piano–weirdly precognizant of Shostakovich–before opening up into an ecstatic, yearning outpouring. The second movement shifts between an impish scherzo and a sinuous section marked Più lento. The following Largo con dolore is Beach at her Romantic best in a poignant, extended narrative. The final Allegro con fuoco is impassioned and driven, yet Beach manages never to lose sight of the sweetness embedded within.
Written primarily during Beach’s first MacDowell Colony residency in New Hampshire, the dreamy single-movement Quartet for Strings Op. 89 (published in 1929) opens with a somber, viola-prominent section marked Grave. Though you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from the über-Romantic settings, the quartet draws upon three Alaskan Inuit songs that Beach found in a collection made by famed anthropologist Franz Boas.
Two brief works round out the program. Pastorale, Beach’s only composition for woodwind quartet, was finished at the MacDowell colony some 20 years after she began writing it. The lilting, almost Celtic opening figures quickly drift into a restful meditation whose spell lingers far longer than the barely three-and-a-half minutes that the piece lasts. Dreaming is a gorgeous work. Originally written in 1892 as one of Beach’s Four Sketches for solo piano, it spins out a lyrical cello melody against a murmuring piano accompaniment.
The ensemble on this recording is a flexibly-sized UK group called Ambache, and this disc stands as a fine testament to these musicians’ elegant and detailed performances–most notable being violinist Gabrielle Lester and pianist Diana Ambache’s ardent and committed rendition of the violin sonata. The sound is excellent. [8/12/2004]
