[Allegro Con Brio]

Beach’s Piano Quintet is absolutely lovely, so based on my knowledge of that work this looks like a great selection. As per my understanding, she stands alongside Ives as one of the first major American composers.

 

[hammeredklavier]

Quartet For Strings (In One Movement), Op.89

 

[Knorf]

Btw, you've been sorely missed..........

You're far too kind. I mean, surely this can't possibly be true. But thank you.

I do hope folks give the Beach a real go. It's a lovely work, among her best in my opinion!

Here's a link on You Tube to a performance on Chandos by members of the Ambache Ensemble:

 

[sbmonty]

I think it's true Knorf. I always appreciate your insights and wealth of knowledge.
This is a lovely work. There is a recurring motif that seems really familiar to me, but I can't place it. Can anyone help me out? I want to say a Shostakovich symphony, but that's probably not it.
I read up on her. Seems the melodies are indigenous, and she passed in 1944, so Shostakovich seems unlikely.

 

[Malx]

Another who will be getting sand in his ears for the first time this week. We are on a run of works I either know/knew very little about or nothing whatsoever - isn't this thread great!

 

[Knorf]

Seems the melodies are indigenous...

Indeed, in her Op. 89 quartet, Amy Beach adapted and utilized three themes borrowed from the Inuit.

 

[StevehamNY]

Like Mr. Knorf, I've been away from this forum for a while (in my case, two major moves for my daughter plus finishing my latest), but I've been trying to keep up with the quartets. For this week, I realized how little I knew about Amy Beach and checked out her wiki entry. Toward the end of the biographical section, it says:

She was a member of Chapter R (New York City) of the P.E.O. Sisterhood. Late in her life, she collaborated on the "Ballad of P.E.O." with the words written by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Chapter BZ/California.​

​

P.E.O. is a longtime women's organization dedicated to helping other women reach their educational goals. I know this because my wife is President of Chapter BQ (Kingston, NY) and a regular voting attendee at the state and national conferences, where they always play the above-mentioned "Ballad of P.E.O." To learn that Ms. Beach wrote the music for this piece made the world seem a lot smaller today.

And happily, I found the piece quite effective and wished it were longer!

(I hope everyone here has been staying safe and well, by the way...)

 

[Merl]

How nice to have two top guys back on the thread. 👍

 

[HerbertNorman]

Beach has a few works that have impressed me over the last few years , after I had started exploring more of her work.
This is certainly one of them
I am listening to that Ambache Ensemble recording on Chandos Records (CHAN10162 ) , which I bought second hand a year or so ago...

 

[Merl]

All nice recordings up to now (but one is standing out). Beach is a composer whose work, aside from this quartet, is a mystery to me but now I've reintroduced myself to this fine quartet I'm going to explore some more of her stuff. I like the 3 themes (that get progressively more interesting) a lot. I'll try the piano quintet later as it's well regarded, especially the Takacs recording which an acquaintance of mine informs me is the "dog's b*locks" (I have some classy friends).