A Room of Her Own - Neave Trio

A Room of Her Own - Neave Trio

CHAN 20238 (Chandos Records, CD)

FIRST RELEASE (2 February 2024)

Playing time: 83'10"
Tracks: 14
Booklet pages: 32
℗ 2024 Chandos Records Ltd
© 2024 Chandos Records Ltd
Main country of recording: United Kingdom
Reviewer: Geoff Pearce
Review of A Room of Her Own - Neave Trio published on 17 January 2024

Neave Trio:
Anna Williams, violin
Mikhail Veselov, cello
Eri Nakamura, piano

Lili Boulanger:

Deux Pièces en trio for violin, cello and piano (1917-18)
1 D'un matin de printemps
2 D'un soir triste

Cécile Chaminade:

Trio No 1, Op 11 (1880)
3 Allegro – Meno mosso – Tempo I – Poco meno mosso – Tempo I
4 Andante – Animato – Tempo I
5 Presto leggiero
6 Allegro molto agitato – Poco più mosso

Germaine Tailleferre:

Trio (1916-17, revised 1978)
7 Allegro animato
8 Allegro vivace
9 Moderato
10 Très animé – Accélérez – Tempo I

Ethel Smyth:

Trio in D minor (1880)
11 Allegro non troppo – Grandioso (breit) – Meno mosso
12 'Der Mutte [sic] der Einfachkeit [sic]?!' (The Courage of Simplicity?!). Andante - Scherzando - Poco meno mosso
13 Scherzo. Presto con brio – Trio – Scherzo da capo – Coda
14 Finale. Allegro vivace

In a follow-up to its extremely successful album Her Voice, the Neave Trio on A Room of Her Own once again champions the works of female composers. The only non-French composer on the album is Ethel Smyth whose Piano Trio, one of her earliest works, was composed in 1880. Like many of her works from this era, it shows a clear nod to the Austro-German influences of her studies in Leipzig, particularly of Brahms. Cécile Chaminade was born just a year before Smyth, and her First Piano Trio was written in the same year as Smyth's. The first performance in Paris was very well received by the critics, and the Trio was published a year later. Germaine Tailleferre's Piano Trio began life in 1916-17 as a work in three movements, and then gathered dust for over sixty years, until a commission from France's Ministère de la Culture, in 1978, enabled Tailleferre to revive and re-imagine it. By then in her mid-eighties, Tailleferre replaced the original second movement and added a fourth. The Trio is an excellent example of her compositional style - a voice that remained consistent though her long compositional career. Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps and D'un soir triste are perhaps now better known in their orchestral versions: this recording proves that the two pieces work equally well at either scale. As they are among the last compositions of her short life - she died of chronic illness at twenty-four - we are left to imagine what she might have written had she lived longer.

Recorded 15-17 March 2023 at Potton Hall, Dunwich, Suffolk, UK.