NZ String Quartet and Diedre Irons Photo: Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts
American composer Amy Beach Photo: wikicommons
Performed by pianist Diedre Irons with New Zealand String Quartet at the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts 2022.
As a composer Beach was largely self-taught. She thrived as a musician and was highly regarded in her own time. When the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed her Gaelic Symphony in 1896, she became the first American woman composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. At the height of the women’s suffrage movement, she was an emblem for women’s rights in America and a symbol of women’s creative power.
Amy Beach composed her Piano Quintet in 1907 and premiered it the following year with the Hoffmann Quartet. The music is highly personal as it reflects her gift of musical synaesthesia – where a composer sees specific colours in their mind relating to specific tonalities. For Beach, the home key of her quintet, F sharp minor, was associated with the colour black. The work is also inspired by Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F Minor which Beach had performed just before composing her own piano quintet.
Recorded 10 March 2022, Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington by RNZ Concert
Producer: David McCaw
Sound Engineer: Darryl Stack
