A wonderful piece about some of our featured female composers, written by Roderick:

The pieces in our programme by Lili Boulanger, Dorothy Howell and Elisabeth Lutyens show fascinating cross-currents between Britain and the continent, France in particular. Lutyens – forthright, modernist and lyrical; Howell – an immensely gifted composer-pianist who enjoyed early success at the Proms; and Boulanger, the light that shone brilliantly but too briefly, the first female winner of the Prix de Rome (1913).

Howell’s music is least well-known today, though that is due for change (she is one of the subjects of Leah Broad’s newly-published ‘Quartet’). A piano student of the renowned Tobias Matthay and composer whose early orchestral work Lamia was a hit at the 1919 Proms; her ‘Spindrift’ for solo piano calls for subtleties of touch that were a Matthay hallmark. The evocative title refers to spray that is blown by the wind across the sea’s surface, and its musical realisation is a melee of alternating hands whose subtle, colourful harmonies span the English Channel. Although the constant rhythm never lets up, the textures continually vary and Howell finds ingenious ways to fashion jets of melody – white horses emerging from blue-green harmony.

What ‘Spindrift’ has in freshness, Boulanger’s famous ‘Nocturne’ equals in languor. Often heard in its transcribed version for violin and piano, we present it in its original form as a work for flute. As French music expert Caroline Potter has pointed out, this makes its allusions to Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune easier to discern; its night-time setting and harmonic palette suggest that Tristan and Isolde have lain here too. But this is a beguiling piece in its own right: an impassioned single sweep with subtle but telling nuances throughout the instrumental parts.

Elisabeth Lutyens has long been recognised as influential amongst British modernists – and cosmopolitan in outlook, therefore. Her Seven Preludes of 1978 are especially vivid, all bearing titles after John Keats such as ‘strange thunders from the potency of song’. The third, ‘Starlight’, is the most concise: three lines of music, but a bold canvas of intense energy. With various recordings of her music having recently been issued her star is ascendent, without ever having left us.

Roderick Chadwick Feb 2023