Maestra. Samantha Ege, pianist; Odile de la Martinez, conductor; Lontano Orchestra. Lorelt LNT150. Total time: 44:00
DIGITAL REVIEW — Cuban conductor Odile de la Martinez and British musicologist-pianist Samantha Ege are artists on a mission. Both are entrepreneurs invested in the contributions of historic and living female composers. Martinez, the first female conductor to lead a BBC Prom Concert, is also the co-founder with flutist Ingrid Culliford of the Lontano Orchestra, an ensemble dedicated to 20th- and 21st-century music. Ege has made her mark by dedicating her scholarship and performing attention to promoting the works of female composers such as Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Undine Smith Moore.
Now, the two musicians collaborate for the first time to offer Maestra, an album featuring the premiere recording of Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in Two Uninterrupted Speeds (1969) by African American composer Julia Perry (1924-79) and a performance of Concerto for Piano and Strings (1948) by British composer Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003).
The album is significant because it parallels the work of two composers hailing from opposite sides of the Atlantic around the same period. Their pieces defer to compositional influences of the time.
Perry, a native of Kentucky and Ohio who made New York her creative home before taking private studio classes with Nadia Boulanger and Luigi Dallapiccola, absorbs Italian inflections in her composition. Carwithen forged her career in film. Her compositional influences are confined to her native England, namely her first professor and later her husband, composer William Alwyn. This point of difference is pronounced.
The revival and recognition of works from the dusty pages of history is always noble. Most would agree that it’s a necessary exercise for the recognition of overlooked female composers. But as is often the case, musicologists rarely have their say in what the public wants to hear again but tend to focus on what musicologists consider relevant for the dissertation.
Carwithen’s concerto, composed when she was just 26, is a somwehat naïve referential work — pleasant, if not altogether memorable. What you hear is a concerto brimming with jaunty, slightly angular melodies with alternating moments of sweeping string melodic accompaniments. The latter feel as if they might have come out of a black-and-white movie of the same vintage. I can only suggest here that the recording of Carwithen’s work is a worthy exercise for documentation. Whether she was unduly neglected is another story.
Perry’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in Two Uninterrupted Speeds reveals a composer of distinct ingenuity. The influence of Italian spectral composition is felt. The two-movement concerto, less than 12 minutes and written in her maturity, reveals a charismatic, listenable voice. It is the main reason to listen to this album. Perry’s composition — really a miniature, pocket-sized concerto — opens with a sedate, slowly unfolding, sparsely orchestrated movement. Scored predominately for strings and winds, it is confident for its restraint and compression of ideas.
In the equally brief second movement of less than six minutes, themes and paint bombs of color explode like popping corn in a pan. And while you might consider that this restlessness would lack cohesion, you would be wrong. The variety makes for oddly compelling listening because the themes are cogently meshed through disciplined harmonic coloring. There are some oddities in the orchestration, such as the unexpected sounds from the wind section, for sure.
The Martinez-Ege collaboration validates the composition. Martinez has landed on exactly the right tempo for both movements of Perry’s rather open-ended directives of “slow” and “fast.” In the minimalist first movement, Martinez and Ege have also found the right equilibrium in the balance of emotion and color. Martinez’s treatment of the quixotic second movement relies on a crisp handling of the rhythmic episodes.
For her part, Ege echoes Martinez’s call for clarity and precision. The piano solo is a little like a game of snakes and ladders. The pianist’s hands must travel across the breadth of the keyboard with aerobic buoyancy. Ege fulfills the mission.
Most importantly, there is a sense of immediacy in this live premiere performance. For this, engineer and editor Adaq Khan must take honors with oversight from the album’s producer, Martinez.
In an age when the term Maestra is being celebrated and denigrated in equal measure, its use here for the title of the album is honorific. While Perry was studying composition with Dallapiccola and conducting in Sienna, the locals of her area dubbed her “Maestra” as an affectionate title. If you can imagine a young African American female composer making her way in Europe in the 1950s, then you might agree that a premiere recording of her work, more than 50 years after it was composed, is a more than justifiable reason. It is a joyous occasion.
