Rosy Wertheim: Trio for Flute, Clarinet and Bassoon (1942)

Rosalie Marie Wertheim was born in Amsterdam to parents John and Adriana Rosa Gustaaf Wertheim Enthoven. Her father was a banker and Rosalie attended a French boarding school in Neuilly, where she took piano lessons. She studied piano with Ulfert Schults and harmony and counterpoint with Bernard Zweers and Sem Dresden. In 1921 she took the state exam in piano and graduated from the Nederlandse Toonkunstenaars Vereniging.

From 1921 to 1929, she taught at the Amsterdam Music Lyceum, composed songs and choral works and conducted children's and women's choirs. In 1929 Wertheim moved to Paris, where she lived for six years, composing music and writing for a newspaper on the Parisian music scene, while studying composition and instrumentation from the composer Louis Aubert. In 1935 she moved to Vienna, where she studied counterpoint with Karl Weigl. In 1936 she traveled to New York City to give lectures and arrange performances of her works.

In 1937, just prior to the start of World War II, she returned to Amsterdam. During the German Occupation, Wertheim gave secret concerts in a cellar where she played music by banned Jewish composers. After September 1942, she went into hiding to escape the Jewish deportations. After the war, Rosy Wertheim taught at the Music School in Laren, but contracted a serious illness and died May 27, 1949, in Laren, the Netherlands.

Below Rosy Wertheim's Trio for Flute, Clarinet and Bassoon is played by Trio Amerise (Flute: Ragnhildur Jósefsdóttir, Clarinet: Morten Sønderskov Jensen, Bassoon: Lucia Amerise). The  four movements are I. Allegro risoluto. II. Adagio. III. Scherzo, IV. Allegro con spirito.

Women Composers Index
 

Best Crime Novels (2): Boileau-Narcejac, Oliver Bottini, John Burdett, James Cain, Andrea Camilleri, Gianrico Carofiglio, James Hadley Chase, Elliott Chaze, Michael Connelly and Edmund Crispin

In this second installment, crime novels from France, Germany, Thailand, USA (thrice), Italy (twice), and Britain (twice).

11. BOILEAU-NARCEJAC, Vertigo (The Living and the Dead, 1954, France)

The Living and the Dead (also known as Vertigo) is a 1954 psychological mystery novel by Boileau-Narcejac (the French crime-writing duo of Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud, aka Thomas Narcejac), originally published in French as D'entre les morts (lit. "From Among the Dead'). It served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo and there the problems start, for the images of the Hitchcock film are - at least in my case - so strong and vivid that they tend to overshadow the prose of the novel. That is all the more regrettable as the story of the novel (the setting, some of the characters) is rather different from the film. But in its own and different way the novel is very good. One difference is WWII as background in the novel. Vertigo begins in a France where the rumblings of war are everywhere in the background; it is 1940 on the eve of World War II in Paris during which the first part plays out, and the second part is set in Marseilles in the summer of 1945, just when the war has ended. The threat of war is an important element of the novel.

The main character is also different from Hitchcock's vision, as Roger Flavières is, especially in the second part, a much more obsessed and cruel character than the rather laid-back James Stewart (who anyway doesn't fit this role, the only flaw of Hitchcock's film). Roger Flavières is even a dangerous, unhinged man (and increasingly a heavy drinker) and that determines the ending which is very different again from Hitchcock.

Other elements are the same: private detective Flavières is asked by an old friend to observe and stalk his wife, as he worries his wife is hiding a secret as she has rather strange ways recently. This turns out to be accurate, but Flavières falls hopelessly in love with the wife. In both book and film there are few sharp twists waiting that will pull the rug from under the reader/viewer.

The ending of the book is very powerful - even all the more devastating as it is different from the film. Vertigo is a stylish and dark thriller of obsession and weaknesses.

12. BOTTINI, Oliver: Zen and the Art of Murder (2004, Germany)

A Japanese Zen monk wanders through the snowy woods and fields near Freiburg in southern Germany, dressed in only sandals and a monk’s cowl. The local population is worried at the sight of this stranger, so Louise Boni, chief inspector with the Black Forest crime squad, gets the assignment to trail him and see what he is doing. Louise has her own demons to struggle with: divorced at forty-two, angry at her father for past neglect, and above all, feeling guilty as she recently shot a criminal to death, she seeks relief in alcohol and is glad with the new task, for she dreads yet another dreary winter weekend alone. She doesn’t know yet what she’ll get on her plate... This is an original thriller - both the character of Louise Boni, the Buddhist element, and above all the literary way of the writing. Only one minus point: the Zen monk tramping on and on through the snow in the Black Forest is a beautiful image, but convincing motivation is lacking. After all, Japanese Zen monks belong to this modern world - when feeling danger, the monk in the novel could call a taxi to take him to the airport and fly back to Japan instead of starting to tramp in the snow.

13. BURDETT, John: Bangkok Tattoo (2003, Thailand) 

London-born John Burdett is known for his crime novels set in Bangkok, centering on Royal Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep and his Buddhist internal dialogues. Sonchai is the progeny of a retired Thai sex-worker and one of her “farang” (foreigner) clients, a long-gone Vietnam War G.I. That gives him an interesting intercultural perspective on Thailand and the West. In the police force he is something of an outsider as he doesn’t take bribes, but he also knows the moral hypocrisy of the West. The novels involve Thailand's sex industry and the red-light districts of Bangkok, but Burdett, who has a deep knowledge of Thai culture, doesn’t give in to Western exoticism. Sonchai’s mother Nong is a madame who operates a brothel as a front for her powerful investor, a police colonel who also happens to be Sonchai’s boss. Sonchai often reminds his readers that they are farangs, and thus outsiders, and that they need to be schooled in the ways of the East. With an element of satire, he juxtaposes the often conflicting Thai and Western norms and mores.

The crimes in Burdett’s cynical mystery novels are completely over the top and utterly bizarre. While in his first novel, Bangkok 8, we had the release of a container full of cobra snakes into a car where the driver is forcibly prevented from escaping, here, in this second novel, we have to face the theft of valuable tattoos (and their associated human skin) off the backs of murder victims. The book opens with one such victim, a CIA operative found disemboweled and mutilated. The prime suspect is a beautiful bar girl, Chanya, working in Sonchai’s mother’s bar, for whom Sonchai has tender feelings. But things turn out to be far more complicated than originally thought, and Sonchai must deal with Chanya's gradually revealed and unexpected secrets, CIA agents who have arrived to investigate the crime, a Thai army general who has a feud with his boss in the police force, yakuza gangsters, Japanese tattooists, Muslim fundamentalists and more. The dialogue is fast-paced, Burdett’s asides and observations are to the point and funny.

14. CAIN, James M.: The Cocktail Waitress (posthumous, edited by Charles Ardai, 2012, USA)

Of course Cain's hard-boiled classics are The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, two books in which strong women, femmes fatales, entice their men to crime. The Cocktail Waitress, a novel found in pieces among his papers when Cain died in 1977, was put together by publisher Charles Ardai, who himself writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Richard Aleas. The novel is not perfect - it sags in the middle - but at least the stitches are not visible. Cain seems to have wrestled with the story in his final years.

Following her husband's death in a suspicious car accident, beautiful young widow Joan Medford is forced to take a job serving drinks in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet and to have a chance of regaining custody of her young son. At the job, in which she is very successful, she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer who makes her blood race and a wealthy older man who rewards her for her attentions with a $50,000 tip and an unconventional offer of marriage.

In her account, Joan presents herself as the object of the intense desire of these two men, but she is hardly a pure innocent. She describes what happens simply and neutrally, but even so it is hard not to see her as a manipulator. The reader feels his doubts slowly growing - are we after all faced here with another one of Cain's femmes fatales?

 

15. CAMILLERI, Andrea: The Shape of Water (1994, Italy)                   

Andrea Camilleri (1925-2019) has created one of the most popular crime series in Europe with his Inspector Montalbano series. The books have a mischievous sense of humor and a lovable hero in the compassionate, but also cynical person of Montalbano. Camilleri, who studied stage and film direction and worked as a director and screenwriter as well as TV producer for RAI, started writing this series when he was almost 70 years of age!

Salvo Montalbano is a detective in the police force of Vigàta, an imaginary Sicilian town, based on Camilleri’s home town of Porto Empedocle, on Sicily’s south-west coast. The novels contain a substantial sprinkling of Sicilian phrases. The name Montalbano was selected by Camilleri as homage to the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who wrote a series of crime novels about a fictional private detective called Pepe Carvalho. Like Carvalho, Montalbano is a great gourmet, and we even get some interesting recipes. These are light and bubbly books, full of Italian sunshine, although the criminals are deadly and cruel and the police officers working for Montalbano not very efficient. There is little character development, throughout the series Montalbano remains the same bon vivant, who never misses a good lunch, or the delicacies prepared by his housekeeper. So you could in principle pick any novel, although “The Potter’s Field” excelled by winning the 2012 Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger. Generally speaking, I prefer the earlier novels when Camilleri's inspiration was still fresh, so the first novel, “The Shape of Water,” also forms a good start. These are books that will always put you in a good mood.

16. CAROFIGLIO, Gianrico: A Fine Line (2014, Italy)

Gianrico Carofiglio, novelist and former anti-Mafia judge, has created the character of defense lawyer Guido Guerrieri, who works and lives in the south-Italian city of Bari, on the Adriatic coast. “A Fine Line” is the fifth in the series. As is the case with other novels in this series of legal thrillers, we get an interesting law case – a detailed presentation of the workings of the Italian justice and legal systems, with philosophical musings about the implications - , some scenes from the private life of the divorced and rather lonely Guerrieri, plus some thoughts on life in general and the way time passes all too quickly.

In this volume, Guerrieri is asked to help a judge, Larocca, who thinks he is under investigation for taking a bribe to affect the outcome of a case. He wants Guerrieri to look into it, and take the appropriate actions. Guerrieri requests a very good PI, Annapaola, a friend for whom he harbors increasingly tender feelings, to find official and unofficial information about the case. This helps him to argue convincingly for Larocca’s innocence, but then he suddenly notices certain things which might mean that Larocca is not so innocent after all... 

17. CHASE, James Hadley: No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939, Britain)

A British novel influenced by the work of James Cain - although he had never visited America, Chase reportedly wrote the book as a bet to pen a story about American gangsters that would out-do “The Postman Always Rings Twice” in terms of obscenity and daring. So Chase pulls out all the plugs and blasts away in mysoginysm, sexism, sado-eroticism, violence and what have you. This is obviously not a politically correct novel, and already in its own time caused a lot of controversy, although it seems to have been the most popular novel among British soldiers during WWII. It is pure pulp that today can only be read with an ironic stance. All the women in the book are sexy with interesting curves and of course they swoon immediately when they see the great macho guys.

Wealthy socialite Miss Blandings has been kidnapped for ransom (and for her pearl necklace) by the Riley gang, but a sadistic rival mob led by Ma Grisson and her idiotic son Slim, snuff out the inept criminals and take over the kidnap. Unfortunately, the sex-starved Slim is obsessed with Miss Blandings, although he only dares torture her when she is made unconscious by narcotics. When the police make no headway, Mr Blandings, who has paid the ransom without getting back his daughter, asks private dick Dave Fenner to look into the kidnap. In 1999, the novel was picked in Le Monde’s “100 Books of the Century.” A tough book, perhaps not for everyone.

18. CHAZE, Elliott: Black Wings Has My Angel (1953, USA)

A story of doomed love on the run, somewhat a la Bonny and Clyde. The book revolves around Tim Sunblade, an escaped convict, and Virginia, a high class escort on the run from the law. Tim happens to have an infallible plan for the ultimate heist, but he needs a partner to pull it off. When he stumbles into bad girl Virginia whom he has hired for the night, he is so impressed by her intelligence and action-readiness (plus greed) that he asks her to become his partner for the heist. What he doesn’t suspect is that this femme fatale might just prove to be more than his match.

It is bleak fun to watch everything go horribly wrong after the armored car heist – the reader wonders when Jim will finally realize that Virginia can’t be trusted at all. What follows after the crime is a road trip to Colorado colored by the love and hate relationship (plus some domestic abuse) of the two, who are at the same time in a disturbing way attracted to each other. Will they finally destroy each other? This is a forgotten noir classic from the 1950s that was brought into the limelight via a recent reprint by New York Review Books.

19. CONNELLY, Michael: The Black Echo (1992, USA)

I bought this novel during a business trip to Los Angeles, now about ten years ago, and read it on the plane back home. How true, I thought, when I read Connelly’s soundbite about LA: “Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, and that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.” LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch is a hard-drinking maverick who quarrels with his bosses and colleagues, a loner and not a team player, in short, the type of detective now so common as to be utterly boring. But The Black Echo was first written in 1992, so it must be an early example of the type. Another historical feature is the Vietnam background of the protagonist – Harry Bosch was a “tunnel rat” who had to enter the underground tunneling systems dug by the Vietcong and try to blow up America’s enemies.

Now, in a drainpipe at Mulholland Dam, the body of fellow Vietnam “tunnel rat” Billy Meadows is discovered with whom he had fought side by side. Harry is determined to find the perpetrator responsible and bring justice to his one time comrade in arms. The plot then spreads out into a dirty money scam from Saigon laundered as precious stones and kept in a bank vault in downtown LA, and that is a weaker part of the book. The strength of the story is the superb characterization of the main players. “I believe that shit happens. I believe that the best you can do in this job is come out even.” Connelly wrote a whole score of novels about Harry Bosch, and this one, the first, is despite its flaws one of the best.

20. CRISPIN, Edmund: The Moving Toyshop (1946, Britain)

Edmund Crispin (Bruce Montgomery) is known for his Gervase Fen novels, of which nine volumes appeared between 1944 and 1953, starting with The Case of The Gilded Fly. The stories feature eccentric Oxford don Gervase Fen, who is a Professor of English at the university and a fellow of St Christopher's College, a fictional institution that Crispin locates next to St John's College. The whodunit novels have complex plots and a decidedly surreal streak. They are written in a humorous, literary and sometimes farcical style. The novels contain frequent references to English literature.

       

Poet Richard Cadogan takes a sudden holiday to Oxford, where he arrives in the middle of the night due a problem with the train connection. Walking through quiet, nightly high street, he stumbles across a shop with its awning still up. Closer inspection reveals it to be a toyshop, and on finding the door unlocked, curiosity leads Cadogan inside - especially as he is looking for a place to sleep. He climbs a flight of stairs to a flat where he finds the murdered body of an elderly woman, before being knocked unconscious. The next morning he wakes up in a supply closet, but after escaping and bringing back the police, the toyshop is no longer there, replaced, it seems, with a grocer's. Bewildered, Cadogan turns to an old friend at Oxford University, eccentric professor and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen, to help him solve the mystery of the "moving toyshop."  

Crispin writes beautiful English, which alone is a pleasure to read. The silly nonsense perhaps goes on a bit too long, but at the end the suspense picks up. The book ends with an out-of-control merry-go-round sequence which was "stolen" lock, stock and barrel by Alfred Hitchcock for the finale of Strangers on a Train - all the major elements of the scene – the two men struggling, the accidentally shot attendant, the out-of-control merry-go-round, and the crawling under the moving merry-go-round to stop it – are present in Crispin's novel, though he received no screen credit for it. It is a thrilling finale to a pleasant novel.

Best Crime Novels 1
Best Crime Novels 2

Best Crime Novels 3

Best Crime Novels 4
Best Crime Novels 5

Best Crime Novels 6

Best Crime Novels 7

Best Crime Novels 8

Best Crime Novels 9

  Best Crime Novels 10

Amanda Röntgen-Maier: Violin Sonata in B Minor (Women Composers 22)

Amanda Maier (1853 - 1894) was born in Sweden in the musical family of a confectioner. At the age of sixteen, Maier went to study at the Stockholm Conservatory. Her main subject was violin, but she also studied organ, piano, cello, composition and harmony. She graduated in 1872.

During her studies she was also taught conducting and upon graduation she was the first qualified female conductor. She immediately began giving concerts in Sweden and abroad. However, she continued to study composition in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke and Ernst Richter and violin with Engelbert Röntgen, the concertmaster of the Gewandhausorchester. It was also at this time that the first compositions came from her pen, consisting of a violin sonata, a piano concerto and a violin concerto. The latter received its premiere in 1875 with the composer as soloist.

In 1876, she became engaged to Julius Röntgen, the son of one of her teachers (about this important composer and conductor, see my article Classical Music in the Netherlands, part 2). In 1880 Amanda and Julius married in Landskrona and moved to Amsterdam. Although Amanda's performances stopped after the marriage, she continued to stay in musical circles. She became acquainted with Edvard Grieg, Anton Rubinstein, Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms.

The marriage produced two children, Julius Jr. (to whom she herself gave violin lessons) and Engelbert Jr. She suffered at least three miscarriages between those two children. After the birth of the last one, her health continued to falter. She suffered from tuberculosis and spent time in sanatoriums in Nice and Davos. She died in 1894.

Amanda Röntgen-Maier's Violin Sonata is here played by Lorenzo Meraviglia in an arrangement by Damiano Danti for violin, strings & piano.

Women Composers Index
 

Florence Price: Piano Quintet in A Minor (Women Composers 21)

Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953) was the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. As she said herself, she was double handicapped: music written by women was preconceived by many to be lacking in depth and logic, and she suffered from a second affliction, her race as an African American. Price was actually of mixed racial heritage, African, European and Native American. She made history when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock premiered her award-winning Symphony in E minor in 1933. Critics raved about the premiere and hoped that this would bring about a new era.

Price was celebrated during her time, but she continued to face gender and race barriers and was not accorded a place in the canon of American music history. A large number of her approximately 300 compositions remained unpublished. In 2009 a cache of her manuscripts was discovered by property developers in the attic of an abandoned house in Illinois. That cache included the present Piano Quintet in A minor, a work which may have been written around 1936, the date of her well-known E-minor quintet. Written in a late-romantic idiom, the piece celebrates African American heritage by echoing the musical language of spirituals and hymns (second movement), and reworking elements of the popular stomping dance that hailed from the slave plantations of the Deep South (third movement). The A minor Quintet was first published in 2017.

Price’s Quintet in A Minor is performed by members of The Symphony of Northwest Arkansas (SoNA): Tomoko Kashiwagi, acting principal pianist; Zsolt Eder, associate concertmaster; Miho Oda Sakon, principal second violin; Jesse Collett, principal violist; and Kari Caldwell, principal cello. There are four movements.

Women Composers Index

Best Crime Novels (1): A Yi, Gilbert Adair, Jussie Adler-Olsen, Richard Aleas, Jakob Arjouni, Arnaldur, Alex Beer, Parker Bilal, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Benjamin Black

Here are my favorite crime novels, ten at a time, divided into 10 posts. I followed the following rules:

• Included are mysteries, detective novels, legal thrillers, hard-boiled novels, and noir novels. In other words, as all-inclusive as possible.
• Only one book per author.
• Only novels, no short stories.
• Only books from (more or less) the last 100 years, with an emphasis on recent novels.
• All selected novels are equal, so no counting down from 100 to 1 - I give the books in alphabetical order.
• Other lists show an unhealthy preponderance of Anglophone novels, and I have tried to restore some balance by including as many interesting examples from other cultures as I could find.
• In the case of overly famous authors or books, I have skipped them and tried to find others.
• As you can see from this list, I am not a fan of puzzle detectives: I prefer mysteries with a strong atmosphere, interesting characters, and a colorful background, and I don't mind if the puzzle is a bit weak.

This first installment features novels from China, Great Britain, Denmark, USA, Germany, Iceland, Austria, Sudan, Argentina, and Ireland.

1. A Yi, A Perfect Crime (2012, China)

This novel paints a sordid portrait of contemporary China, and in this respect reminded me of "Villain" by Yoshida Shuichi, which does the same for contemporary Japan's alienated society - neither are true "crime" novels, but rather books in which contemporary society is viewed through the lens of crime). The protagonist is a 19-year-old nihilistic youth who is completely unlikable and incomprehensible, like a strange animal. After graduating from high school, he murders a classmate by luring her to his aunt's apartment (where he lives), stabbing her 37 times, and then shoving the body into the washing machine. There is no motivation at all for this senseless murder, except that he is fed up and bored with life and society. He goes on the run with no prospect of escape, but being chased by the police at least gives him a sense of purpose. Eventually he is caught. He then frustrates the authorities by offering no motive for his monstrous act. But this bleak portrait of youthful nihilism in China is only half of the novel. What follows is a detailed description of the trial, including the appeal to a higher court, where the mother has hired a shrewd underling and sold her house to pay a large sum of money to the mother of the murdered girl, so that a plea for leniency will be possible. This is the most satirical part of the book, exposing the hypocrisy of society (not just a Chinese problem!). By the way, the Chinese title "xiàmiàn wǒ gāi gàn xiē shénma" translates as "So, what should I do next?

2. ADAIR, Gilbert: The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006, Britain)

A witty pastiche parody of the tired Agatha Christie-esque English country house murder mystery of the 1930s (even the title is a rip-off of Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"), full of in-jokes and references to the conventions of the genre. But besides being a parody, it also works on the level of a classic whodunit, with a period snowed-in country house setting, a cast of equally suspicious guests, two seemingly unfathomable murders, and an ingenious solution so clever that it overcomes the reader's feeling that it is all highly improbable.

When one of the guests at a Boxing Day party is found shot to death in an attic (in a closed room), an outsider - retired Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Trubshawe, who happens to live in the neighborhood - is called in as a sort of Poirot stand-in. The deceased is a nasty gossip journalist who fought with and was hated by everyone at the party (he was also a gatecrasher). We get the usual interviews with the guests, all of whom are suspects, and gradually various back stories are revealed. One guest is the formidable mystery writer Evadne Mount (a Christie stand-in?), and it is quite satisfying that it is she, rather than the Scotland Yard professional, who finally puts all the pieces together. As the story unfolds, it is full of borrowings and echoes, red herrings and well-hidden clues, and references to familiar mysteries. All in all, a delightful entertainment.

3. ADLER-OLSEN, Jussi: The Keeper of Lost Causes (aka Mercy, 2007, Denmark)

A novel about second chances. Homicide detective Carl Mørck, the all-too-familiar figure of the burnt-out detective, has bungled an arrest and killed two colleagues - for which he takes the blame. As a result, he is "promoted" to a new department, Department Q, to deal with hopeless cases that have been shelved. His first assignment concerns the missing politician Merete Lynggaard, who disappeared five years ago and is presumed dead. But she isn't... not yet...

The daily life in the police department, the office politics, the procedures and the investigations are very realistic. The most interesting character in this dark novel is Mørck's seemingly inept assistant Assad, a Syrian refugee with no social skills at all, but with amazing insight. So we have the setup of the lone cop and his trusty - and exotic - sidekick solving a terrible crime and bringing justice, a nice variation on the usual police procedural theme. The book is not flawless - the dramatic showdown at the end is a bit much, and the motivation for the crime is based on revenge so outrageously improbable that it almost spoils the whole novel - but it is a very entertaining read and the start of a series that stands out among the many other Nordic noir mysteries.

4. ALEAS, Richard: Songs of Innocence (2007, USA)

"Songs of Innocence" is the second novel by Richard Aleas, the pen name of Charles Ardai, the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime. The book is a loose sequel to his earlier work, "Little Girl Lost," but the necessary information is repeated, so it is not necessary to read the first novel before this one. Although set in a hard-boiled noir environment, the protagonist is a soft-boiled young man who works as a teaching assistant in a writing program at Columbia. One of the participants in the program is Dorrie, who pays for her tuition at the university by providing sexual services. At the beginning of the novel, he finds her body in the bathtub of her apartment, an apparent suicide, but since he knows her well enough to be sure that she would never kill herself, he is convinced that she was murdered. With some private eye experience from a previous job, he decides to find her killer and is led into an underworld of massage parlors and Asian bathhouses where he must contend with vicious Hungarian gangsters. As he desperately tries to solve the mystery of Dorrie's death, one of the gangsters is murdered and a nationwide manhunt ensues for him as the prime suspect. The downward spiral leads to a powerful climax, but again, not a conventional one: the final powerful blow comes when he learns the shocking truth about Dorrie, an ending that is darker than dark.

5. ARJOUNI, Jakob (Jakob Bothe): Happy Birthday, Turk! (1985, Germany)

German crime writer Arjouni is best known for his Kayankaya series, which features private eye Kemal Kayankaya and is set in Frankfurt am Main. Most of Arjouni's works are written with a keen eye for the experiences of the outsider in German society. Kayankaya was born in Turkey but adopted at a very young age and raised by a German family. Despite his outward appearance, he is culturally German, and contrary to the expectations of those he meets, he is actually rather unfamiliar with what it means to be Turkish. He only speaks German - so he's a "Turk" who doesn't speak Turkish and is caught between cultures. Debauched, hard-drinking and self-loathing, Kayankaya is a hard-boiled detective in the American mold of Hammett and Chandler. The story of Happy Birthday, Turk! centers on the stabbing death of a Turkish laborer on the steps of his "junkie prostitute" girlfriend's apartment building. The case is brought to Kayankaya by the murdered man's wife after the police are unwilling or unable to investigate in depth. So Kayankaya plunges into the seedy underworld of Frankfurt's red-light district, overindulging in Scotch and caffeine, making enemies on both sides of the law, and slowly gathering pieces of the puzzle.

6. ARNALDUR Indriðason: Jar City (1997, Iceland)

Inspector Erlendur is your archetypal Nordic noir detective: while searching for criminals, he must also face his own demons. He is in his 50s, long divorced, out of touch with his ex-wife and son, and with a daughter, Eva Lind, who suffers from varying degrees of drug addiction. In this novel, she is pregnant and still using; she flits in and out of Erlendur's life angrily, as if crying out for help. The weather in the novel is always cold, dark, and either raining or snowing (winter is Erlendur's season, not summer).
       
The body of a 70-year-old man, who has been hit on the head with a glass ashtray, is found in an apartment in Norðurmýri. The only clues are a photo of a young girl's grave and a cryptic note left on the body. Detective Erlendur discovers that the victim was accused of a violent rape some forty years ago, but was never convicted. The man turns out to be a nasty piece of work indeed, and Erlendur is disgusted to discover that he and his associates may be linked to other rapes and deaths of young women in the past. And then there is the suffocating, moldy smell in the man's apartment...

The novel won the Scandinavian crime writers' Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel in 2002, and was made into a movie of the same name. What I like about this novel (and other books by Arnaldur) is that the plot is neither too daring nor too unrealistic; the story spins a thread that connects sensitive issues: sex crimes and the problem of the information society, where the genetic ID of individuals has become the property of private companies.

 

 

7. BEER, Alex (Daniela Larcher): The Second Rider (2017, Austria)

Vienna in 1919, after the First World War, is a desolate and run-down place. The Habsburg Empire is a fading memory, and most of Vienna's remaining population survives by its wits, living hand-to-mouth in a city rife with crime, prostitution, and grotesquely wounded beggars - many of them soldiers returning from the war to find a city very different from the one they left. Poverty is rampant, and the only functioning market is the black market, which operates (literally) underground, using the sewers (which play such a large role in The Third Man) to store and transport goods. Shortages of essential goods create countless opportunities for unscrupulous operators.

August Emmerich is a police inspector in the city. Emmerich is determined to join the Vienna Major Crimes Unit, and he's more than willing to break the rules in pursuit of his ambition. He is also a war veteran who uses alcohol and heroin to control the pain of a war wound. He and his junior partner, Ferdinand Winter, are involved in both tracking down black market smugglers and investigating a series of murders in the city (which their superiors have labeled suicides). The two cases inevitably overlap - with war crimes committed on the Eastern Front, in Galicia, coming back to haunt post-war society. In addition to being an excellent thriller, this novel is also a meticulously researched piece of historical fiction (comparable to the "Gereon Rath novels" by German author Volker Kutscher, set in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis). Post-WW1 Vienna is beautifully recreated. Alex Beer is the pen name of Daniela Larcher (1977), who was born in Lustenau (in the western tip of Austria) and studied archaeology in Vienna. Larcher is the author of ten thrillers, including four in the "August Emmerich" series.

8. BILAL, Parker: The Golden Scales: (2012, Sudan / Britain)

Parker Bilal is the pseudonym under which Jamal Mahjoub, a writer of British and Sudanese parents, writes crime novels. He has also published eight literary novels under his own name. "The Golden Scales" was the first crime novel by this author. It is the beginning of a series set in Cairo, featuring former Sudanese police inspector Makana, who was forced to flee to Cairo and now struggles as a private detective, living on a flimsy houseboat and just scraping by. But then he is hired by the richest businessman in Cairo to find the missing star player of the soccer team sponsored by the corrupt mogul. In a second simultaneous case, Makana is asked by the Cairo police to help solve the murder of an Englishwoman who visits Cairo every year to search for her daughter, who disappeared seventeen years ago when she was only four years old. These two mysteries will take Makana into the treacherous underbelly of his adopted city. He will also come face to face with an old enemy from his own past. The novel vividly describes Cairo as a feverish tangle of the old and the new, the super-rich and the desperately poor, with inequality and corruption everywhere. A great portrait of the teeming city and its many problems.

9. BIOY CASARES, Adolfo & OCAMPO, Sylvia: Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (1946, Argentine)

A "Gilbert Adair-like" mystery, a stylish postmodern pastiche that pokes fun at the conventions of the genre. The narrator is the stupid and vain doctor Humberto Huberman, a devotee of homeopathy (and therefore addicted to arsenic pills), who travels to the isolated seaside resort of Bosque del Mar to work on his screenplay - an adaptation of Petronius' Satyricon set in present-day Argentina. On the beach, he meets Mary and her sister Emilia and their fiancé, Dr. Cornejo, as well as eleven-year-old Miguel. Coincidentally, he already knows Mary: "It's so hard to recognize people in bathing suits..." Then Mary almost drowns in the sea, Emilia and Mary argue, Emilia cries, a sandstorm shakes the hotel, and the next morning Mary is dead: strychnine. Who did it? Of course, everyone is a suspect, has a motive, and had the opportunity. Clues are laid, relationships are confused, the lovers suspect each other. But it's just a literary game full of allusions and ironic jokes, which doesn't even pretend to be real anymore...

10. BLACK, Benjamin (John Banville): Christine Falls (2007, Ireland)

The first in a series of mystery novels about a consultant pathologist at the Dublin City Morgue, the massively built but brusquely amiable Dr. Quirke. Set in Dublin in the 1950s, they were written by Irish author John Banville (1950) under the pen name "Benjamin Black". John Banville is known for his precise prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and the dark humor of his (often immoral) narrators. Christine Falls is set in the buttoned-down Dublin of the 1950s, as the author remembers it from his early youth, "a poverty-stricken but beautiful city, dingy and ramshackle, with a melancholy beauty. Benjamin Black's Dublin is full of fog, coal dust, whiskey fumes, and stale cigarette smoke. His protagonist is a troubled man, hard-drinking and intolerant, a damaged man in many ways - more at home among the corpses in his pathologist's lab than among other people. He lives alone, and his depression is exacerbated by his longing for his dead wife's sister and his difficult relationship with his daughter, Phoebe. Banville was inspired to write these novels by Georges Simenon - not the Maigret books, but the "romans durs", such as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes or Tropic Moon. Banville thought these were masterpieces of existential fiction, far better and less self-consciously literary than anything by Sartre or Camus. They inspired Banville to try his hand at crime fiction, and he has done a splendid job. Again, we have a life story of the protagonist, especially in the first few novels of the series, so it is best to read them in order of publication, starting with Christine Falls.

Best Crime Novels 1
Best Crime Novels 2

Best Crime Novels 3

Best Crime Novels 4
Best Crime Novels 5

Best Crime Novels 6

Best Crime Novels 7

Best Crime Novels 8

Best Crime Novels 9

  Best Crime Novels 10

 

The Japanese Seasons: May

May is a wonderful month with many interesting festivals, customs and holidays. On top of that, May is one of the most pleasant seasons in Japan, when greenery is rapidly increasing under strong sunlight. The traditional name for May is Satsuki, a word possibly derived from a term meaning "early rice sprouts." Around the 6th of May is traditionally the first day of summer. The fine, fresh, clear days which give a hint of the approaching summer are called "Satsuki-bare." 

[Koinobori by Hiroshige]

May starts with Golden Week, which contains four national holidays in a seven-day period. The official holidays are:

April 29, Showa Day (Showa no hi): the birthday of former Emperor Showa, who died in the year 1989.
May 3, Constitution Day (Kenpo kinenbi): commemorates the enactment of the new postwar constitution on May 3, 1947.
May 4, Greenery Day (Midori no hi): dedicated to the environment and nature.
May 5, Children's Day (Kodomo no hi): in fact the day of the traditional Boy's Festival (Tango no Sekku). Families pray for the health and future success of their sons (now also daughters) by hanging up carp streamers and displaying samurai dolls, both symbolizing strength, power and success in life. The Girl's Festival is celebrated on March 3. May 5 is also the day around which courageous rituals such as yabusame (hitting the mark with an arrow from a running horse) and other military arts are performed at shrine festivals.

For example, on May 5 the Kurabe Uma Jinji (Horse-Riding ceremony) is held in the wide grounds of the Kamigamo Shrine. This festival is believed to have originated in 1093, when a horse-riding ceremony was performed for the gods to obtain a good harvest and peace. It was subsequently held every year using horses sent from around the country as offerings to the shrine. Twenty colorfully dressed riders, after first paying homage to the main shrine building, take turns racing their horses two by two.

The counterpart for the hina dolls of the Girl's Festival is the heroic male doll of the Boys' Festival called Gogatsu Ningyo (May Doll). They are also called "yoroi kabuto" (a warrior's armor and helmet) and usually portray heroes from Japanese history and folk tales. Yoroi and kabuto were important items to demonstrate one's heroism in the old days. These dolls, with their intricately made armor, are extremely expensive, and one sees them very little in private homes nowadays.

[Koinobori]

Koinobori, carp streamers, fluttering in the blue sky of May are a great sight. The banners, made of colorful fabric, symbolize carps climbing against a waterfall and show the wish for boys to have the same spirit. The custom originated during the middle of the Edo period and the story of the carp who became a dragon after swimming upstream goes back to a Chinese legend. As it is difficult to put up carp streamers in an urban environment, you see them mostly in the countryside.

Kashiwamochi ("oak leaf rice cakes") are the counterpart to sakuramochi because they are meant for the boys' festival on May 5. They consist of a white mochi (cake of glutinous rice) filled with red bean paste and wrapped in oak leaf. This leaf is not edible - in the past oak leaves were used as plates to hold food. 

[Kashiwa-mochi]

Traditionally, Hachijuhachiya falls on either May 2 or May 3. In the traditional calendar this is the 88th day since the beginning of spring on February 4 (Risshun), and this day was considered suitable for planting seeds and seedlings in the field, including the seedlings of rice. The planting time is considered as the most important part of the agricultural year and is looked upon as a religious festival. The deity of the rice field is present during planting, and songs sung during the planting are addressed to him. This is also the time that farmers can work in their fields without worrying about frost damage to the crops.

Hachijuhachiya is also the time for tea picking (chatsumi). The fresh green tea leaves are full of nutrients and do not have an astringent taste. They come to the market as the new green tea of the year. Japanese green tea can be divided into various types depending on the time of year the leaves are picked and processed. Green tea picked during the best season has a fragrant aroma and refreshing taste.

On May 5 there is also the custom of plucking mugwort and iris leaves and use them in the bath water to ward off evil. This is called shobu-yu, an iris bath. Besides that, a herbal bath is of course good for one's health. 

[Katsuo by Hiroshige]

Early May is considered as the beginning of summer, the time that katsuo, striped tuna fish (also called bonito), migrate north. The first bonito of the season is called hatsu-gatsuo. Bonito had been consumed at court since the third century, but was especially popular during the Edo period (1603-1867). Especially the lean hatsu-gatsuo was considered an expensive delicacy at that time. Indeed, the Edo city people valued the first bonito of the season because they thought everything was "cool" that was first. Basho wrote:

you made it!
getting past Kamakura alive
first bonito of the summer

Much katsuo was caught in the sea near Kamakura, and the fish was not only offered to the great Shinto temple in the city, but also taken to Edo as a gift for the shogun. Hatsu-gatsuo was so highly prized in those days that a saying went, "I would be willing to pawn my wife to be able to taste hatsu-gatsuo." Sashimi or tataki (seared on the outside with the inside remaining rare) of bonito is still popular in early summer.

On May 3 and 4 the Hataka Dontaku festival is held in Fukuoka. The festival is said to have started as a New Year's Day celebration in the Muromachi period (1333-1568) in which local citizens dressed up as the Seven Deities of Good Fortune or as Chigo (child shrine and temple attendants) and performed in the style of the matsubayashi processional then popular in Kyoto. Doll-decorated platforms and elaborate floats (dashi) were added during the Edo-period (1600-1868) when the current name was adopted (apparently from the Dutch word "Zondag", "Sunday," which was taken to mean "holiday").

[The Saio-Dai or Vestal Princess in the Aoi Matsuri parade]

One of the most elegant festivals of Japan is the Aoi Matsuri or "Hollyhock Festival" held on May 15 in Kyoto. The aoi plant (hollyhock or heart vine) is sacred to the Kamo shrines (Shimogamo and Kamigamo in Kyoto) and at the Kamo festival people used to decorate their headdresses and carriages with it. During the Heian Period, these leaves were believed to protect against natural disasters such as earthquakes and thunder, and were often hung under the roofs of homes for protection. The Kamo festival was the greatest festival of Kyoto in the Heian period and still exists as a beautiful panorama of courtly times. The main procession on May 15 is led by the Imperial Messenger, followed by a retinue of 600 people all dressed in the traditional costumes of Heian nobles, plus two oxcarts, four cows and thirty-six horses. The oxcarts are adorned with artificial wisteria flowers. The procession starts at the Kyoto Imperial Palace and slowly works its way towards the Shimogamo shrine and finally (in the early afternoon) the Kamigamo shrine. At both shrines, the Saio-Dai (the Vestal Princess) pays her respects, and the Imperial Messenger intones the imperial rescript praising the deities and requesting their continued favor (read more about the Aoi festival and its role in the Tale of Genji in my article at this blog "Reading the Tale of Genji (9): Heart-to-Heart (Aoi)."

On the third Sunday in May the Mifune Matsuri (Three Boats Festival) of Kuramazaki Shrine is held in Kyoto. The serene atmosphere of the Heian period is recreated on the Oi River where the emperor and his courtiers often went  to view the fine scenery of Arashiyama. Gaily decorated boats float down the river, while music is played on the two larger craft, of which the bowsprits are fashioned in the form of a dragon and a phoenix. The flotilla of boats makes a beautiful panoramic picture coupled with the natural beauty around them.

The third full weekend in May is the time that the Sanja Matsuri is held in Tokyo. During this popular and noisy local festival, on Saturday more than 100 portable machi-mikoshi (shrines belonging the the different wards) in which Shinto deities (kami) reside, are carried through the streets to bring good fortune to the local businesses and residents. And on Sunday, the main festival day, the three main honja-mikoshi make their ceremonial exit from the Asakusa Shrine where they are housed. The festival honors the three founders of Sensoji Temple, who are enshrined in the Asakusa Shrine next door to the temple. For the duration of the festival, Asakusa is in "matsuri mode" and packed with stalls selling food and other items. In the dance known as binzasara-mai the dancers beat time with binzasara, percussion instruments made from wooden slats tied with cord.

Seasonal flowers are tsutsuji (azaleas) from mid-April to mid-May, and fuji (wisteria) from late-April to early-May. 

[Azalea Festival in the Nezu Shrine, Tokyo]

Japan is a paradise for azaleas and the hardy plant has long graced urban gardens, their flowers often lasting several weeks. Their popularity already starts with Prince Kusakabe in 7th c. Nara (who wrote about azaleas in his death poem), and is continued in The Tale of Genji in which Genji gives his young beloved Murasaki a garden where azaleas grow alongside other flowers. In the Edo period, there even was a sort of azalea boom among samurai gardeners, who looking something new, developed interesting new variants of the flower. Despite its popularity, the azalea has been neglected in the decorative arts. By the way, azaleas can be distinguished from rhododendrons  - of which they are a subgenera - by having only five anthers per flower. There are many azalea festivals in japan - for example, the Nezu Shrine in Tokyo holds a Tsutsuji Matsuri from early April until early May. And Shiofune Kannon Temple in Ome celebrates a wonderful Tsutsuji Festival on (and around) May 3.

[Wisteria trellis in the Kasuga Shrine in Nara]

The Fuji or wisteria was considered as an aristocratic flower in ancient Japan, because of its sweet scent and graceful blossoms, but also because the use of the color purple in their dress was a prerogative of court and aristocracy. Its links with traditional culture are numerous:
- In The Tale of Genji, not only is the name "Fujitsubo" (Wisteria Pavilion) given to Genji's stepmother (with whom he falls in love and even has a child), his young beloved was called "Murasaki", "Purple", after the flower - and the author (Murasaki Shikibu) even took this name herself.
- The name of the powerful Fujiwara family means "Wisteria Field."
- A flowering branch of wisteria was an elegant gift, often accompanying a love poem.
- Wisteria were not only grown on trellises, but lustrous cascades of wisteria flowers hanging on old pine trees in the forest were even more admired.
- The image of Fuji Musume (Wisteria Girl) was a bestselling Otsu folk painting and was also adapted to a Kabuki dance which is still often performed.
- Wisteria were also a popular symbol in family crests and heraldry.
- Wisteria were a popular design element in art, for example in the national treasure "Tea-leaf Jar with a design of wisteria" by Nonomura Ninsei in the MOA Museum, or the "Wisteria screens" by Maruyama Okyo in the Nezu Museum.
- Wisteria also appear frequently in poetry, from the Manyoshu to haiku. Basho wrote:

kutabirete | yado karu koro ya | fuji no hana

when - exhausted -
I arrive at my inn:
wisteria flowers!

Rebecca Clarke: Morpheus for Viola and Piano (Women Composers 20)

Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) was born in England to an American father and German mother. After her musical studies with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music (the first woman to do so), she pursued a career as performer on both violin and viola. She was a prominent concert violist both at home and abroad, and highly active in chamber and symphonic ensembles. In fact, she became one of the first female musicians in a fully professional ensemble, Henry Wood's Halle orchestra.

In 1916 Clarke made her first trip to the United States. Here she met Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the famous promoter and financier of "new music." Encouraged by Coolidge, Clarke wrote the piece "Morpheus for viola and piano" in 1919. That same year she entered the Coolidge Competition with her Sonata for Viola and Piano, winning second prize (the composer Ernest Bloch won first prize). The sonata proved to be a great success. 

This was followed in the productive 1920s by a piano trio (1920), which again won second prize in the Coolidge Competition, as well as other interesting pieces of chamber music. In the 1930s, however, Clarke barely wrote any music, as she was involved in an affair with a married man, who was using up all her energy (as she divulged later).

When WWII broke out while Clarke was again visiting the United States, she remained in America, in fact for the rest of her life. She also started composing again, such as the Dumka for violin, viola, and piano, and Passacaglia on an Old English Tune for viola and piano.

However, in 1944 she married James Friskin, who was teaching at the Juilliard School in New York. Unfortunately, Clarke's marriage marked an end to her creativity. She devoted herself to her husband's career and wrote little music herself. Rebecca Clarke wrote music in a late romantic, rather chromatic style. Her Sonata for Viola and Piano has been discussed in my blog post The Best Works for Viola.

Here I'd like to introduce one her earliest works, the short "Morpheus for Viola and Piano," named after the Greek god of sleep and dreams. "Morpheus" uniquely develops a single melody through coloristic devices such as pentatonic glissandos on the piano and artificial harmonics on the violin. Below is a fantastic rendering by Jeremy Berry, viola & Michael Refvem, piano.

Women Composers Index

Dora Pejačević: Piano quartet in D minor, Op. 25

Dora Pejačević (1885-1923) grew up in Našice in east Croatia, in a town of which a significant part was the feudal property of the Pejačević family until 1945. Of course, this was before WWI still part of the large Habsburg Empire. Her father was the Croatian Count Teodor Pejačević, her mother a Hungarian baroness and a trained pianist and singer. Dora Pejačević received her first music lessons in Budapest and Zagreb, and studied further in Dresden and Munich. She was a composition pupil of the obscure English composer Percy Sherwood, but was essentially self-taught. She was widely read in literature and philosophy and her circle of acquaintances included the Viennese journalist and writer Karl Kraus as well as Rainer Maria Rilke.

Dora Pejacevic’s earlier compositions mostly consisted of piano pieces, sonatas, and songs, but significantly she became the first woman in Croatia to write orchestral works. Because of her late romantic, harmonically and instrumentally refined tonal language, she is considered a representative of the fin de siècle; occasionally her style has been compared to that of Rachmaninoff. Today, she is considered one of Croatia's most important 20th century composers and many of her works, during her lifetime, enjoyed considerable success and were performed throughout Germany, Austria, Hungary and the rest of the Habsburg Empire. After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, she helped in Našice throughout the war as a nurse caring for the wounded. At the same time she composed intensively. Some of her best works were written during this time. There are 58 compositions: songs, piano solos and chamber music including: piano quartet, piano quintet, violin sonata, cello sonata and two piano sonatas. But there are also impressive orchestral works, such as an excellent symphony and a piano concerto. Her Symphony in F-sharp minor is considered by scholars the first modern symphony in Croatian music.

She married in 1921 and sadly died two years later, at age 37, due to what some sources specify as complications during childbirth.

The Piano Quartet in d minor was completed in 1908 and has been written in the late Romantic style. It starts with a chromatic Allegro ma non tanto; this is followed by a warm and lyrical Andante con moto; then a playful Allegretto grazioso; and finally a Allegro comodo, a spirited dance with effective use of pizzicato.

The performers are: Csilla Pogány, Violine; Philip Nolte, Viola; Lucia Tenan, Cello;
and Fausto Quintabà, piano.

Women Composers Index

Nadia Boulanger: Trois Pièces pour violoncelle et piano (Women Composers 18)

Nadia Boulanger (1887 - 1979) was a French music teacher and conductor. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist. She was the elder sister of Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) who was first and for all a composer.

From a musical family, she achieved early honors as a student at the Conservatoire de Paris but, believing that she had no particular talent as a composer, she became a teacher. In that capacity, she influenced generations of young composers, especially from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Some famous students are George Antheil, Grażyna Bacewicz, Daniel Barenboim, Lennox Berkeley, İdil Biret, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Astor Piazzolla, and Virgil Thomson - to name a few. “As far as musical pedagogy is concerned - and by extension musical creation - Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived.” Stravinsky called her "an intellectual Amazon," and Copland wrote later that their meeting was the most important one in his musical life.

Boulanger taught in the US and England, but her principal base for most of her life was her family's flat in Paris, where she taught for most of the seven decades from the start of her career until her death at the age of 92. Boulanger was also the first woman to conduct major orchestras in America and Europe, including the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, Hallé, and Philadelphia orchestras. She conducted several world premieres, including works by Copland and Stravinsky.

Boulanger’s work as a solo composer includes over 30 songs, chamber music and a Fantaisie variée for piano and orchestra. Her musical language was highly chromatic, though always tonally based. Boulanger stopped composing in the early 1920s to follow her pedagogical calling, but her compositional legacy does include the below delightful 3 Pieces for Cello and Piano (originally written for the organ in 1911, but arranged for cello and piano in 1914).

The 3 Pieces are here played by Bryan Cheng, cello, and Silvie Cheng, piano.

Women Composers Index

Germaine Tailleferre: Violin sonata No 1 in C-sharp Minor (Women Composers 17)

Germaine Tailleferre (1892 - 1983) is known as the only woman in the Groupe des Six (Group of Six), the youthful group of French composers that worshiped the twin gods Satie and Cocteau.

Tailleferre received her first music lessons from her mother. Against her father's wishes, she began her studies at the Conservatoire in Paris at the age of 12. Her fellow students included Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Georges Auric. From 1919, she was friendly with these three composers as well as with Francis Poulenc and Louis Durey in the Groupe des Six, which pursued a new anti-romantic simplicity.

After World War I, she lived in the Parisian artists' district of Montparnasse, where she received important artists, including Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1925, she traveled to the United States to perform as a solist with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg for the premiere of her piano concerto. She also played the piano with Charlie Chaplin, who wanted to take her to Hollywood to compose film music. Instead, she returned to Paris. In 1931 she gave birth to her only child, a daughter called Françoise, with lawyer Jean Lageat. The couple married one year later but would divorce in 1955 after years of separation. She spent the war years 1942-1946 in the US again.

Tailleferre wrote many of her most important works during the 1920s, including her First Piano Concerto, the Harp Concertino, three ballet scores (Le marchand d'oiseaux, La nouvelle Cythère, and Sous les ramparts d'Athènes), as well as several pioneering film scores. The 1930s were even more fruitful, with the Concerto for Two Pianos, Chorus, Saxophones, and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the opera cycle Du style galant au style méchant, and what has been called her masterwork, La cantate de Narcisse, in collaboration with Paul Valéry.

After World War II she wrote a lot of music commissioned by the radio and the French government, as well as an impressive number of film and television scores. Germaine Tailleferre continued to compose right up until a few weeks before her death, but many of her last scores were not published anymore. In addition to her work as a composer, she was a teacher, including at the Schola Cantorum de Paris (1970 to 1972).

Tailleferre is sometimes treated rather lightly, like a sort of latter-day Chaminade, but although her works have their share of chic and charm, that is a grave error. The first violin sonata was debuted in 1922 by Thibaud and Cortot. It is in four movements and somewhat classical in style despite its polytonality. Tailleferre's technical skill is immediately evident in the well balanced dialogue between the two instruments that characterizes the opening movement (modere sans lenteur). The second movement is a witty scherzo. The third movement (assez lent) is the most emotionally charged of the four and leads directly to the finale (tres vite) which abounds in rhythmic effects.

The First Violin Sonata is played below by Mariia Perekrestenko (violin) and
Vivian Naegeli (piano).

Women Composers Index

Amy Beach: Piano Quintet in F-sharp Minor Op. 67

Amy Beach (1867 - 1944) was the first American woman composer to make a name for herself in music.

Amy Marcy Cheney was born to a distinguished New England family. She was a child prodigy who started composing when she was four and who gave her first recitals when she was seven. When she was fourteen, Amy received her only official composition training, by studying harmony and counterpoint for a year. Apart from that, she received no other lessons and was self-taught, mainly by studying classical pieces as Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

In 1883 she made her professional debut in Boston. After her marriage in 1885 to Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach - a Boston surgeon 24 years her senior - she agreed to limit her performances to one public recital a year and devoted herself to composing. 

After her husband died in 1910, she toured Europe as a pianist and played her own compositions at the concerts. She was determined to make a reputation both as a pianist and as a composer. Amy Beach's major compositions include the Mass in E major (1892), the Gaelic Symphony (1893), a violin sonata, a piano concerto, the Variations on Balkan Themes, a piano quintet, various choral works and chamber music compositions, piano music, and an opera, but she was best known for her songs. She composed mainly in a romantic idiom, which is often compared to that of Brahms. Relative to the success she enjoyed in life, Amy Beach's music has been little performed since her death.

Beach wrote her three-movement Quintet for Piano and Strings in F-sharp minor, Op. 67, in 1905. The quintet was frequently performed during Beach's lifetime, both in concert and over the radio. These performances were often given by established string quartets with Beach on the piano. Among all of Beach's chamber works, the quintet is closest to Brahms, from the jagged chromatic melody and contrasting lyrical passages, irregularly phrase lengths and key changes, to its lush texture. The primary theme used in all three movements, in fact, is borrowed from the last movement of the Brahms' piano quintet, albeit adapted and reworked in a variety of ways. The entire work is like an extended lamentation, also in its use of the Phrygian tetrachord cadence frequently associated with mourning. This work added to Beach's reputation as a composer of serious high art music, although it was still deemed slightly beneath the works of similar male composers by some (male) reviewers. Nonsense - just listen for yourself!

Women Composers Index

Cécile Chaminade: Piano Trio No 2 in A Minor Op. 24

Cécile Chaminade (1857 - 1944) was born in Paris and became a famous French composer and pianist.

She was first taught by her mother and when she was eight she played some of her compositions to Georges Bizet, who was impressed by her talent. She studied composition with Benjamin Godard, but not officially, because her father disapproved of her music education (she never had a proper conservatory training). But she was encouraged by Camille Saint-Saëns, Emmanuel Chabrier and Bizet to pursue her career.

She gave her first concert when she was 18 years old, and from then on her compositions gradually became popular. After a tentative debut with the premiere of her first piano trio, opus 11 (1880), in 1888 works for orchestra were premiered: the ballet Callirhoë, opus 37 in Marseille, a Concertstück for piano and orchestra, opus 40, and a dramatic symphony with choir Les Amazons, opus 26 in Antwerp.

In 1892 she made her debut in England, where her work would become very popular. Chaminade married an elderly music publisher from Marseilles in 1901, but after his death a few years later did not remarry. In 1908 she visited the United States, where a warm welcome awaited her from her many admirers. She made her debut there with her Concertstück with the Philadelphia Orchestra on November 7, 1908.

Before and after World War I, Chaminade recorded many piano rolls for the player piano. In London in 1903 she made gramophone recordings of six of her compositions for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company, which are among the most sought after recordings for piano by collectors. The famous French composer Ambroise Thomas said of Chaminade, "This is not a woman who composes but a composer who is a woman." In 1913 she was awarded membership in the Legion of Honor as the first female composer.

Chaminade's oeuvre is extensive. She wrote mostly character pieces for piano, and salon songs. Some notable pieces include a Suite for orchestra (1881), an opéra-comique La Sévillane, op. 10 (1882), 2 piano trios, a concertino for piano and orchestra, ballet music and other orchestral works. The Concertino for flute and orchestra, opus 107 which she wrote on commission from the Paris Conservatory for the 1902 flute competition was her last composition for orchestra. Her compositions for piano include some 200 pieces in the romantic style, including a Sonata in c minor for piano, opus 21 and an the Étude symphonique, opus 28. Chaminade's compositions largely fell into oblivion during the second half of the 20th century. Some of her songs were recorded by Anne Sofie von Otter. Her most popular and frequently played composition is the Concertino for flute and orchestra in D major, op. 107.

Chaminade has been called a typical "lady composer" because she often wrote in the French salon style, known more for its tasteful tunes than any great depth of feeling. But I disagree with that statement where it concerns her best works, such as the present piano trio. Listen for yourself!

Chaminade's Piano Trio No 2 in A Minor is played by the ATOS Trio (Annette von hehn, violin; Stefan Heinemeyer, cello; Thomas Hoppe, piano). The trio is in 3 movements and was first published in 1887.

Women Composers Index

Allegro moderato

Lento



Allegro energico