Chronicles for Solo Violin by Delphian Records

KATRINA LEE

This recording has been made possible by funding from Creative Scotland, Chamber Music Scotland, and from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Athenaeum Award.

This album would not have been possible without the incredible support of so many people. To my sponsors, thank you for your generosity and belief in my vision; your support has been instrumental in bringing this project to life. To my family and friends, your unwavering love and encouragement has kept me grounded and inspired throughout this journey. Thank you for believing in me and standing by my side – your presence in my life means more than words can express. This album is as much yours as it is mine and it is dedicated to all the voices in classical music that deserve to be heard. Thank you. — KL

Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté (189 9–19 74) Ten Caprices

Caprice I (Die Kranke und die Uhr)

Caprice II (Scherz)

Caprice III (Chant triste – chant gai)

Caprice IV (la isla de oro)

Caprice V (Danse marocaine)

Caprice VI (El pajarito)

Caprice VII (Le départ d’un train)

Caprice VIII (Elegie)

Caprice IX (Chestnut Hill at Night)

Caprice X (Klage)

Sally Beamish (b. 1956) The Wise Maid [3:24 ]

Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994) Six Miniatures*

Preamble (2)

Preamble

Meditation

Dialogue Lullaby Badinage

* premiere recording

Recorded on 17-19 July 2024 at The Robin Chapel, Edinburgh

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis

24-bit digital mixing & mastering: Paul Baxter

Cover & instrument imagery © Elly Lucas

Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com

Design: Eliot Garcia

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK

www.delphianrecords.com

‘Women,’ declared Sir James Swinburne in 1920, ‘are nowhere in composition.’ ‘There’s a good reason why there are no good female composers,’ announced Damian Thompson in The Spectator nearly a century later, in 2015 (without, quite, saying what the reason is). A few years before that, and in the context of a more sympathetic approach to the subject, Fiona Maddocks nonetheless asked in The Observer: ‘For all the many good, even excellent women composers, why has there not yet been a great one? Where is the possessed, wild-eyed, crackpot female answer to Beethoven, who battled on through deafness, loneliness, financial worry and disease to create timeless masterpieces?’ Elizabeth Maconchy, one of the composers featured on Katrina Lee’s pioneering new album, had posed more or less the same question in 1975, at a conference entitled ‘A Woman Composer in a Man’s World’.

Lee’s album is an attempt to address some of these questions head on. ‘When one thinks about solo violin repertoire,’ she remarks, ‘perhaps Bach, Paganini and Ysaÿe initially come to mind.’ By instead presenting – or ‘unearthing’, as she puts it –relatively unknown music by a trio of female composers, Lee identifies a certain ‘risk’: of asking for special consideration, perhaps; or even making a ‘point’ about gender for its own sake. If these issues seem to be irrelevant today, we only have to look at a Daily Telegraph article from September 2024.

Under the headline ‘The cult of inclusivity has ruined classical music’, Simon Heffer maintains that Sir James MacMillan (the ‘greatest living British composer’) should have been appointed Master of the King’s Music ahead of Errollyn Wallen – a composer whose music he admits he has never taken the time to listen to. Indeed, that a disc of entirely female-composed music should still be unusual – and still somehow require a defence of its ‘riskiness’ - is entirely understandable given the depressingly consistent questioning of the merits of Woman as Composer.

Those exercised by such matters seem in thrall to certain assumptions, or to subscribe to Samuel Johnson’s ‘dog walking on its hind legs’ theory in relation to women preachers (‘It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’). Back in 1920, Swinburne, an electrical engineer by profession, had things to say both about brain size, and about ‘receptive’ versus ‘productive’ minds: while men are usually productive, he claims, women are always and only receptive, with no capacity for structured thought of any kind. Hence – unlike engineers, for example – women are unable to tackle the complexities of a structured composition. Even as recently as 2003, Simon BaronCohen argued that ‘the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems’; in

other words, receptive versus productive. By contrast, Ernest Newman (in 1910!) made the very sensible point that ‘till social and economic conditions enable women to make composition their life-work, as men can do, it is idle to dogmatise upon what the natural limitations of the feminine brain may or may not be’.

she later wrote, ‘simply wouldn’t consider a woman’s work seriously’. As Anna Beer comments in her excellent study of neglected female composers Sounds and Sweet Airs: ‘Maconchy took [the RCM] by storm. The rest should be history. That it is not is one of the driving forces behind this book.’

Linda Nochlin, in her ironically titled and very influential essay ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, initially makes the somewhat dispiriting point that ‘there are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt’ – but shortly thereafter reminds us of the complete disparity between women’s and men’s educations. Women painters, for example, were forbidden by institutions from painting the nude body until the late nineteenth century. In terms of musical training, it was only in the early twentieth century that women were permitted to study composition at the Royal College of Music. (Rebecca Clarke was the first female pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford there.) Maconchy, who was part of the first significant cohort of female students at the RCM in the 1920s, did not generally experience sexism while there – apart from a notorious remark that she was better off not receiving a grant because she would ‘get married and never write another note’. It was on attempting to make her way in the professional world that the trouble started, particularly with regard to publishers who,

As women continue to strive both to create music of quality and for their work to be given a chance at recognition on the same terms as their male colleagues’, the sheer persistence of figures like Maconchy in the face of centuries of cultural opposition is worth celebrating. As the violinist Anne Macnaghten once put it:

It is difficult enough to become a successful composer, particularly difficult for a woman. Those who persist in writing serious music must surely be driven by an urgent inner compulsion.

Maconchy herself stated that ‘I compose because I have to, from that there is no escape’. The three composers on this album, all from different periods of the twentieth century, were (or are, in the case of Sally Beamish) successful, well respected and performed reasonably frequently in their own time despite insidious, often institutional sexism. Their tenacity and ‘inner compulsion’ are part of each’s story, and underpin the fascinating – and brilliantly constructed –music their female brains produced.

In an article written in 1955 Anne Macnaghten detected in Maconchy’s music a ‘relentless’ pursuit of a particular musical gesture, or ‘cell’ of a few notes. This cell often formed the basis of a movement or entire work. It was not, as Macnaghten put it, for the purpose of ‘sterile repetition’, but always in the service of emotional expression. The Six Miniatures are intricately constructed, with a cell (or several) per movement, plus a subtle interconnection across all six – a focused return to a particular note, for example, or echoes of the ‘cell’ from a previous movement – which creates a psychologically satisfying coherence to the whole set.

in ink by the composer, the work began with a different ‘Preamble’, and was titled Five Miniatures. At some point Maconchy clearly decided to expand the set to six, writing a new preamble (here called '2', but placed first) and adding above it the overall title used in the present recording, Six Miniatures. At this point she also sketched an additional movement, ‘Roundabout’, to appear in the middle of the sequence, but never copied it in ink. Thus, although six miniatures was her final intention, it was probably not the six heard here, and listeners may prefer to skip one or other of the ‘Preambles’ in listening to the work.

In ‘Lullaby’ (dedicated to Maconchy’s granddaughter Sarah) the recurring motif is a minor third outlining D–F–D, along with a recurring drone on the violin’s lowest note, an open-stringed G. The repeated notes familiar from the previous miniatures make brief appearances, while the major sevenths of ‘Dialogue’ are recontextualised as yearning suspensions. The jaunty ‘Badinage’ follows, in an offbeat 5/8 metre. Tinged with jazz, it comprises a medley of gestures previously encountered: the ‘warming-up’ motif of ‘Preamble (2)’, repeated notes, and a fixation with the note A. Like all the other miniatures, it ends softly.

Spain during their marriage. Sadly Gramatté, often in poor health, died in 1929. His art was celebrated in an exhibition in 1933 curated by the art historian Elisabeth Sudeck (dedicatee of the first two Caprices), but was later denounced by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’.

Maconchy’s manipulation of these discrete cells can often manifest as playful, the repetitions sometimes taking on the character of an ‘in-joke’ rather than an academic exercise. The energetic ‘Preamble’ – here titled ‘Preamble (2)’, for reasons which will be explained shortly – is a case in point. Sounding briefly like a warm-up, with its testing out of the open strings, the violinist takes a chromatic slide at the end of the second bar. This slide, along with open fifths and a fascination with the notes of A and D, becomes one of the movement’s ‘hooks’. It concludes with a witty slide back up to the open fifth of the start.

From here, the work – which Maconchy never published – takes two possible directions. In the only form of the work fully copied out

‘Preamble’, the original opener, has the same DNA as the other miniatures – Ds, As, open intervals – but is a boisterous wisp of a movement that, unlike the others (or its later replacement), closes on an emphatic forte chord. The later-composed ‘Preamble (2)’ seems designed to lead more directly into ‘Meditation’, which opens with that movement’s closing A before featuring a series of emphatically repeated notes as its ‘cell’, or ‘hook’, laid out in a question-and-answer structure across the violin’s register and gently ornamented with grace notes. ‘Dialogue’, the longest movement, retains the repeated notes and elegant ornamentation of ‘Meditation’. Marked parlante (‘speech-like’), its dialogue manifests across the registers, the conversation often turning spiky with discordant major sevenths.

There is a suggestion of self-deprecation in this brilliantly crafted work’s title: these ‘miniatures’, while short, are no more so than the individual movements of a Bach suite.

The complex name of Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté – born Sofia (Sonia) Friedman-Kochevskaya – is a useful starting point in tackling the fascinating life of the composer herself. She was born in Moscow in 1899, and studied in Paris as a child before moving to Berlin in 1914. She married the artist Walter Gramatté in 1920. He is the dedicatee of two of her Ten Caprices for solo violin; she in turn was the subject of many of Gramatté’s paintings and woodcuts. The couple moved home frequently, travelling back and forth from Germany to

In 1934 Sophie-Carmen remarried, to the Austrian journalist Ferdinand Eckhardt. After the war they emigrated to Canada, where they established the Eckhardt-Gramatté Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of both Eckhardt-Gramatté’s music and her first husband’s art. Eckhardt-Gramatté became well known as a composer and teacher in her adopted country. She died in 1974, leaving some 175 works behind, most of which are seldom performed today. More recently, rumours of Ferdinand Eckhardt’s associations with the Nazi Party in the 1930s have been circulating, causing disquiet and the removal of his name from various art galleries and libraries; it is not known to what extent he was a believer in Nazi ideology or whether his wife had any knowledge of or complicity with such beliefs.

If it seems somewhat counter to the spirit of this recording to map a woman’s life through her husbands, not only her name but also her life and career were to a large degree entwined with them both – particularly, in the case of the Caprices, with Gramatté. Most of this extraordinary collection of ten pieces was composed while she was married to

and travelling with the artist. Several of the lightly programmatic titles constitute a kind of travelogue from the period.

Eckhardt-Gramatté was herself a talented violinist and wrote frequently for her instrument (including a concerto composed in 1929); she would often perform her Caprices in recitals. As with Maconchy’s Miniatures, the title is somewhat at odds with the content: some of these ‘caprices’ last nearly ten minutes, and several are deeply expressive in content. The first two are a contrasting pair of dance-like pieces. ‘Die Kranke und die Uhr’ (‘The [Female] Invalid and the Clock’) is a mournful sarabande with an evocative ‘ticking’ on a high A, suggestive of a clock watched from the sickbed. ‘Scherz’ (‘Joke’), suitably playful, has the quality of both folk music and a Baroque dance; indeed, without some gnarly passages of chromaticism some of this movement could have been lifted from the Baroque era itself.

The rest of the Caprices fall into two broad types, with some sharing of material across the two. Caprices III, VII, VIII and X each begin and end with a soulful, song-like melody (which sometimes reappears, refrain-like, elsewhere in the movement). In between are virtuosic excursions which either flow from the initial gesture (the rising figure in ‘Le départ d’un train’, for example, feeds the energetic rhythms in the ‘excursion’ sections) or provide expressive contrast. ‘Chant triste –

chant gai’ is the template for this group, with its strophic phrases at the start and finish, contrasting with an energetic trio section in a romping G major. ‘Elegie’ is similar in its minor–major–minor ternary form. In ‘Le départ d’un train’ the slow passages suggest either the build-up of steam or the thoughts of a pensive passenger, interrupted by periodic, hectic movement. The final caprice, ‘Klage’ (‘Lament’), is given its solemn quality by the presence of a falling semitone throughout.

The remaining movements (Caprices IV, V, VI and IX) are improvisatory in character, most of them evoking Eckhardt-Gramatté’s travels: Mallorca, Morocco, Philadelphia. ‘Danse marocaine’ has a touch of Ravel’s 1924 solo violin work Tzigane in its ‘exotic’ contours, while ‘la isla de oro’ intercuts song-like refrain with extravagant virtuosity. ‘Chestnut Hill at Night’ is perhaps the most extrovert – a series of boisterous gestures, one of them marked ‘almost brutal’ – and at times appears to channel American folksong.

‘El pajarito’ (‘The Little Bird’) is a substantial evocation of birdsong, somewhat belying its ‘littleness’. It builds throughout in stratospheric height and intensity; Eckhardt-Gramatté suggested that, unless performed in a large venue, the violinist play this movement with a mute. This recording is a rare opportunity to hear all ten of Eckhardt-Gramatté’s Caprices – a remarkably rich and substantial contribution to the solo violin repertoire.

Sally Beamish’s The Wise Maid, meanwhile, is an uproarious set of variations which increase in difficulty throughout. It was originally composed as an encore for cello in 1998 (the violin version dates from 2011), and is based on an Irish folk tune of the same name. This tune is hinted at in the relatively low-key opening minute, elements of it manifesting alongside a drone on E. As the tempo revs up the tune emerges more clearly, until at a passage marked con pena (‘with sorrow’) the music veers completely off the rails into a series of lurching, off-key chords. A chromatic scramble down the fingerboard lands the player back into the folk tune in a passage marked, suitably, con sollievo – ‘with relief’.

Lucy Walker is a freelance writer and speaker specialising in the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She worked for many years at The Red House in Aldeburgh, and her PhD (King’s College London, 2005) was on the operas of Francis Poulenc. She has edited two books on Benjamin Britten, and is the co-editor of Maconchy in Context (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).

Biographies Also available on Delphian

Katrina Lee is a violinist and collaborative musician based in Scotland, known for her dedication to championing diversity and inclusion in the arts. A multi-awardwinning violinist and alumna of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Katrina earned a first-class honours degree and a Master of Music under the tutelage of Professor Andrea Gajic. Katrina’s academic journey was marked by numerous accolades, including the Hilda Bailey Award, Ian D. Watt Award, Governors’ Prize for Strings, Robert Highgate Scholarship, Governors’ Prize for Chamber Music and The Musicians’ Company Goldman Award, and she was a Scottish Ensemble Young Artist in 2014 and 2016.

Hailing from Yorkshire, Katrina’s violin journey began with the support of the late Stephen Bell, who recognised her love for reading and writing and thought she might enjoy translating that passion into reading music. His generous sponsorship was crucial to her early development on the instrument, and this encouragement has continually sparked Katrina’s dedication to her craft as well as inspiring her lifelong commitment to ensure others have access to opportunities engaging in music.

Katrina has performed extensively with the UK’s top orchestras and ensembles, including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic

Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Royal Northern Sinfonia. A highlight of her work has been touring, which has enabled her to visit many countries and perform on international stages across Europe, South America and Asia.

In her musical pursuits, Katrina aspires to amplify the voices of historically overlooked composers; she is passionate about collaborating with like-minded musicians who share a commitment to showcasing lesser-heard parts of the classical musical heritage.

In addition to her performance career, Katrina is a lecturer in the Strings faculty at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland; where she is dedicated to teaching and nurturing the next generation of musicians with a holistic approach. Katrina is also deeply involved in community music education, mentoring young musicians through the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and Benedetti Foundation youth music programmes.

Katrina is a passionate advocate for access to music for all, striving to make music education and performance opportunities available to everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status.

Katrina performs on a contemporary violin (2003) by Andrew Fairfax, inspired by Guarneri del Gesù, and uses a bow by Claude Thomassin.

Stone, Salt & Sky (Beamish / Maconchy / Strachan / R Clarke)

GAIA Duo

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Violin and cello duo GAIA’s debut album release features three works specially written for the duo, and also bears testimony to their championing of works by underrepresented and overlooked voices from classical music’s past. Elements of folk and jazz string-playing styles rub shoulders with traditional chamber-music imperatives in a programme that is full of women’s voices: those of the performers; of composers Sally Beamish, Rebecca Clarke and Elizabeth Maconchy; and of the singers of two Scottish folksongs, taped recordings of which frame Duncan Strachan’s hauntingly evocative

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

‘fiery confidence … Only a few tracks in and you’re transfixed’

— The Scotsman, April 2023, FIVE STARS

Beyond Twilight: music for cello & piano by female composers

Alexandra Mackenzie, Ingrid Sawers

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Furthering their longstanding interest in unfamiliar repertoire, cellist Alexandra Mackenzie and pianist Ingrid Sawers have unearthed for this album a treasure trove of short pieces by female composers, some hiding behind bland initials such as ‘A. E. Horrocks’. Dating from the 1880s to the 1950s, these intimate, quietly powerful works include miniatures by the Scottish cellist Marie Dare and two delightful songs by Gwendolen (later Avril) Coleridge-Taylor, here newly transcribed for cello. A total of fourteen works are presented, all but five in premiere recordings.

‘From a shimmering “Shieling Song” to a shaded sea shanty, Mackenzie plays with appropriate panache’

— BBC Music Magazine, Christmas edition 2023

Painted Light

Solem Quartet, Ayanna Witter-Johnson voice

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This inventively curated album presents music that is awash with colour. The refined beauty of Edmund Finnis’s Devotions and stained-glass luminosity of Camden Reeves’s The Blue Windows are complemented by works by Lili Boulanger and Henriëtte Bosmans from the early twentieth century, when the depth and vividness of colour in Impressionist paintings seemed to spill into music. A sense of awed wonder before the natural world informs Ayanna WitterJohnson’s Earth, for which the Quartet is joined by the composer as vocalist, while Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now – heard here in an arrangement by the Quartet’s violinist William Newell – provides a delicate lesson in perspective.

‘Solem Quartet have produced a thing of beauty … catches your breath for all the right reasons’ — dCS: Only the Music, Classical Choices, October 2023

SOLA: Music for viola by women composers

Rosalind Ventris

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Rosalind Ventris’s debut solo album features a selection of music for unaccompanied viola composed between 1930 (Imogen Holst’s impressive Suite for Viola) and the present day (a 2020 lockdown miniature by Thea Musgrave). The largely British and Irish programme allows Ventris to revive substantial works by important yet still often overlooked twentieth-century composers – not only Holst but also Lillian Fuchs, Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens and Grazyna Bacewicz – alongside more recent additions to the repertoire from Musgrave, Sally Beamish and Amanda Feery. With several of the composers themselves professional string players, this is, in Ventris’s words, ‘wonderful music – that just happens to be by women composers’.

Jane Stanley: Cerulean Orbits

The Hermes Experiment, Red Note Ensemble

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This first portrait album dedicated to the music of the Australianborn, Glasgow-based composer Jane Stanley showcases pieces composed between 2013 and 2023 for different chamber combinations. In addition to some of her favourites among her existing works, Stanley took the opportunity to develop two new pieces: one for each of the two ensembles involved. A song cycle for The Hermes Experiment moves Stanley’s music intriguingly towards the tonal, lyrical sound-world of that group’s two acclaimed recent Delphian releases, while sharing with the purely instrumental music of the rest of the album – performed by Red Note Ensemble, also acclaimed Delphian regulars – an audible concern with intricately ornamented melody and intertwining woven textures.

‘Atmosphere and texture are at the heart of this recording … Captivating performances’ — BBC Music Magazine, November 2024

1919:

Benjamin Baker violin, Daniel Lebhardt piano

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The works on this recording speak from a decade of both musical and world-historical change. Claude Debussy and Lili Boulanger both died in 1918, two extraordinary careers cut short early; the programme includes some of their last works. Edward Elgar lived on for another fifteen years, but wrote little more to match the four major compositions which emerged from his pen in 1918 and 1919.

Leoš Janáček, by contrast, was about to enter an astonishing Indian summer of creativity; his violin sonata stands on the cusp.

‘Baker and Lebhardt, who listen and respond to each other precisely and sensitively, are ideal and impassioned guides’

— The Observer, May 2023

CODA (Janáček / Boulanger / Debussy / Elgar)

Chronicles for Solo Violin