Beach
Piano Works (Une prodige empêchée)
Jennifer Fichet (piano)
Edition Hortus 237 76:38 mins
Amy Beach has earned her place in the history books as America’s first female symphonist, but it’s only in recent decades that her music has started to filter into the performing repertoire.
Her piano music is a case in point. It’s not that it was unheard in her lifetime. Far from it.
A professional pianist herself, Beach wrote a good number of works for piano, mostly but not exclusively miniatures, between 1889 and 1937.
Some were taken up by other leading pianists of the day, the likes of Josef Hofmann and Olga Samaroff.
Yet after her death in 1944, Beach was ignored for decades.
In her recent book The Piano: A History in 100 pieces, the pianist Susan Tomes notes that ‘in years of piano lessons, concert-going and postgraduate seminars I never once heard a piece by Amy Beach’.
That’s all changing, not least in the recording studio.
Jennifer Fichet is the latest pianist to take up Beach’s cause, and her beautifully performed, warmly recorded album helps reveal the worth of her music.
The opening Valse Caprice, premiered by Beach when she was 22, sparkles in Fichet’s hands, drawing the listener into a programme full of poetry and virtuosity.
Broadly speaking, her music falls under the umbrella of European romanticism: listen for the echoes of Liszt in ‘Fireflies’ from Four Sketches, the spirit of Chopin in the Ballade and impassioned Nocturne.
Fichet’s playing is wonderfully well-rounded, and she’s equally as good distilling the mood in the sparer Old Chapel by Moonlight of 1924 and A Cradle Song of the Lonely Mother of 1914 as getting stuck into the technical demands of the substantial, 20-minute Variations on a Balkan Theme. Rebecca Franks