[ Chandos / CD ]
Release Date: Friday 23 February 2024
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In a follow-up to its extremely successful album Her Voice, the Neave Trio on A Room of Her Own once again champions the works of female composers. The only non-French composer on the album is Ethel Smyth whose Piano Trio, one of her earliest works, was composed in 1880. Like many of her works from this era, it shows a clear nod to the Austro-German influences of her studies in Leipzig, particularly of Brahms. Cécile Chaminade was born just a year before Smyth, and her First Piano Trio was written in the same year as Smyth's. The Paris première was very well received by the critics, and the Trio was published a year later. Germaine Tailleferre's Piano Trio began life in 1916 - 17 as a work in three movements, and then gathered dust for over sixty years, until a commission from France's Ministère de la Culture, in 1978, enabled Tailleferre to revive and re-imagine it. By then in her mid-eighties, Tailleferre replaced the original second movement and added a fourth. The Trio is an excellent example of her compositional style - a voice that remained consistent though her long compositional career. Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps and D'un soir triste are perhaps now better known in their orchestral versions: this recording proves that the two pieces work equally well at either scale. As they are among the last compositions of her short life (she died of chronic illness at twenty-four), we are left to imagine what she might have written had she lived longer.
"The Neave Trio chamber ensemble brings each vividly to life, but reserve the most imposing work to last. Ethel Smyth's Piano Trio in D Minor (1880) invokes her youthful connections to Brahms in a weighty and well-argued score that foreshadows the strength of the major scores of her maturity. Taken together, these four composers make a rewarding quartet." ****
The Financial Times
"…These chamber works are still not in the mainstream. The Neave Trio … put their case eloquently." - The Guardian
LILI BOULANGER
D''un matin de printemps
D''un soir triste
CÉCILE CHAMINADE
Trio No.1, Op.11
GERMAINE TAILLEFERRE
Trio
DAME ETHEL SMYTH
Trio