ナスティー・ウーマン

ジョアナンナ・ゴールドスタインは、インディアナ大学サウスイースト校の音楽教授。20世紀初頭から1940年代初頭にかけて作曲された女性作曲家たちの重要作品集。
東京エムプラス

Even though the album title Nasty Women is derived from the contentious U.S. presidential election of 2016, Joanna Goldstein's 2018 release on Centaur is a survey of piano music from the era of women's suffrage a century earlier. More specifically, it brings together short piano pieces by female composers who participated in a music conference held in April 1925 in Washington, D.C., five years after the passage of the 19th Amendment. The program opens with a block of single pieces that span the period, from Virginia Roper's 1906 composition, In Venezia, to Florence Price's Fantasie Negre from 1929, grouped with works by Clara Gottschalk-Peterson, Mary Howe, Harriet Ware, Julia Niebergall, May Aufderheide, and Gena Branscombe, showing a range of styles from ragtime to parlor miniatures. The program offers more substantial coverage of Frances Marion Ralston, Ethel Glenn Hier, Amy Beach, Ulric Cole, and Mana-Zucca (Gisella Zuckerman). Of these composers, Amy Beach is the best-remembered for her prolific output, and she is represented by two character pieces, A Hermit Thrush at Eve and A Hermit Thrush at Morn, both drawing on the late Romantic style. A standout selection is Dana Suesse's Afternoon of a Black Faun from 1938, where she blended classical and jazz elements with a sophistication likely acquired from her famous teacher, Nadia Boulanger. Goldstein's performances are sensitive and at times sentimental, as befits much music of the fin de siecle, with the exception of the rags that receive a jauntier treatment.