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Meditations on Coltrane's Legacies
by Salim Washington
Reminiscing on Ruth
by Bess Lomax Hawes
New Music Notes
by Carol J. Oja
An Amy Beach Discography
by Adrienne Fried Block
ISAM Matters
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Celebrating Jelly Roll
by Jeff Taylor
Listening to Beach
by Liane Curtis
Transcribing the Folk
by David Evans
Our Singing Children
by Jane Palmquist
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 An
Amy Beach Discography
by Adrienne Fried Block
A spate of recent
recordings of the music of Amy Beach (1867-1944) has brought the percentage
of works on disc to over fifty percent. Now some record stores have five or
six CDs sitting behind the Beach divider at any one time. One can find her
opera, Cabildo, in a recording by some of today’s outstanding singers (e.g.,
Lauren Flanigan, Paul Grove, and Anthony Dean Griffey). There are two
recordings each of the piano concerto and “Gaelic” symphony, but not one of
her delightful light orchestral work, Bal masque, played recently by the
Boston Pops. Also in the half empty department are concert arias, the Mary
Stuart soliloquy, Eilende Wolken, Segler der Lüfte, for mezzo and orchestra,
and Jephthah’s Daughter, for soprano and orchestra—singers, take note.
Of her songs, about one third are recorded
to date, among them the best known—e.g., the three Browning songs—and lesser
known but stunning “Rendez-vous” and “In the Twilight.” Still awaiting
singers are many fine songs. For starters, see two songs to German texts, the
peaceful “Nachts” (Night), and the dramatic “Allein,” the latter on the same
text as Schubert’s “Ihr Bild” and Clara Schumann’s “Ich stand in dunklen
Traümen.”
All of her chamber music is now on disc,
most of it in multiple versions: the piano trio, the piano quintet, and the
Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet. Each has five recordings;
the Violin Sonata has seven. A casual browse in a record store one day turned
up the Pastorale for woodwind quintet—the only remaining unrecorded chamber
work—played, to my surprise, by the Reykjavik Wind Quintet.
The complete solo piano music is on disc;
one will even find Beach’s Suite for Two Pianos Founded Upon Old Irish
Melodies. The exception, to date, has been her music for children to play.
Some of that, however, will soon be available on a CD by pianist Sahan
Arzruni.
The genre only begun to be explored is
choral music. Beach wrote over forty sacred works of which ten are recorded.
Fortunately three of the largest works, the Service in A for choir and organ,
Mass in Eb , and the Canticle of the Sun, are on disc, the latter two with orchestra.
Among the missing is the historic Festival Jubilate, written for the opening
of Women’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, a
work most suitable for a music service. All the secular choruses await
recording, including attractive works such as the three men’s choruses on
texts by John Masefield, and the two women’s choruses, The Sea-Fairies
(Tennyson) and The Chambered Nautilus (Oliver Wendell Holmes).
Names of publishers of modern editions of
Beach’s music can be found in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, 2nd edition.
—Music in Gotham
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Editors’ note: Click here to go to Amy Beach: A Discography.
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