When I settle down to listen to new (to me) recording of music by historical women composers, I am always split in my anticipation. In part I am eager to hear someone’s take on music that has been recognised as worthy of the enormous commitment it take from many people to produce a CD, in part I retain a wariness left over from having experienced a not-so-long-ago era in which badly-recorded performances by mediocre musicians seemed to dominate the market for women’s music – as if a lack of artistry and craft can somehow be hidden in unknown music, rather than exposed in the spotlight of the ‘canon’.
Fortunately, Anna Shelest’s CD proved itself to be more than triumphantly worthy of the repertoire it advocates. Every track is a pearl on a thread spanning 200 years, one that ties together some of my favourite pieces from Fanny Hensel to Chiayu Hsu, by way of Amy Beach, Clara Schumann Cécile Chaminade and Lili Boulanger. New York-based Ukrainian pianist Anna Shelest is, her website informs me, a “champion of esoteric repertoire”. I’m not sure that music by composers that represent over 50% of the world’s population counts as esoteric, but I get what they’re trying to say. I listened to the whole CD from beginning to end, revelling in the whole as a wash of experience, before returning to each track with a more Hanslickian attention to detail – I’m sure Eduard would have disapprovingly dismissed my first hearing as “warm bath” listening.
The first thing that struck me was the absolute clarity in everything, not just in tone, but also in phrasing and structure. This was particularly apparent in Fanny Hensel’s G Minor Sonata, where she tends to pay mere lip-service to more traditional forms, imbuing the whole more with her own ways of breathing at the keyboard. Shelest manages this superbly, so that all four movements cohere audibly into a Henselian structure, rather than sounding like a pale and unworthy Mendelssohnian imitation. Hensel sings in everything she writes and so does Shelest sing at the keyboard, not just in the top line which I find is a tendency in some Hensel recordings, but throughout the texture. The same attention to line brings out the hidden delights in the two shorter works by Hensel’s contemporary, Clara Schumann, not least the quote from Schumann’s marvellous song “Er ist gekommen” in the Scherzo. My only quibble here is that Hensel is named as Fanny Mendelssohn, her name previous to marriage, while Clara is given her married name. To me, this sends out a dubious message. Within advocacy, naming matters.
Cécile Chaminade is represented here with two of the Concert Etudes Op. 35, and the stand alone Les Sylvains. Chaminade, of course, has often been dismissed as a light and sentimental composer, producing what Carl Dahlhaus called “pseudo-salon” music, though anyone who has played her works on nineteenth-century pianos will know just how she pushes the instrument to its limits. Shelest finds the salon nature of the music in its truest sense, as Cornelius Cardew put it, as music for “the place where music can be most powerfully and overpoweringly itself.”
Amy Beach’s vast capacity for story-telling in both large and small arcs is revealed here in the two Sketches and the longer Ballade. Shelest does not allow the complexity of the harmony in the latter piece to overshadow its lyricism. Lili Boulanger is represented in her Prelude in D Flat Major, a piece that has drawn differing receptions, especially given its score availability from manuscript to heavily-edited version. It’s been suggested that the piece was unfinished, certainly a possibility, although it offers a unified serenity, a testament to Boulanger’s capacity to conjure the spiritual through her harmony. The CD finishes with Chiayu Hsu’s 2014 work Rhapsody Toccata, a piece that uses semi-extended techniques as well as traditional toccata and jazz idioms, two styles that Hsu explains that she sees as “contrary” to each other. It’s a virtuosic conclusion to the recital.
At times in my listening, I would have liked more variety in sound; it seemed as if Shelest’s priority was to demonstrate the strength within the notes that so many have assumed just isn’t there in women’s music. This results in quieter passages often sounding like a retreat from the microphone, rather than a change in relationship between fingers and keyboard. The underlying aesthetic means that this is forgiven, however, and the whole CD should be on the shelves of every lover of nineteenth-century piano music.