Armstrong

The interbellum Twentieth century offers one of the most fascinating ecosystems of piano music, yet it is dominated by works by composers like Berg, Prokofiev, and Barber—established repertoire, heard every season. This lecture-recital explores an “alternative” cross-section of repertoire—rarely-heard “outcast” works written by women between the two World Wars from different parts of the world—arguing that these are just as worthy contributions to a more equitable, inclusive piano literature.

Varvara Gaigerova’s incandescent Piano Sonata and Four Sketches are breathtaking, emotional testaments to an artist who is totally unknown (and whose bravery has also gone unrecognized and uncelebrated as one of those subversive individuals “re-habilitated” by the Soviet regime). Fromm-Michaels’s Piano Sonata is her masterpiece for the instrument and arguably one of the greatest works of its kind to come out of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. It was written under duress in a time of war and by someone who was later persecuted by the Social Democratic Party of Germany because of her Jewish husband. Jean Coulthard is one of Canada’s greatest composers; her cycle of 13 Preludes spans her career, but many come from that ecosystem of WW1/WW2-era music and are fascinating, important works, as is the cycle of piano preludes by Henriëtte Bosmans. As a queer Dutch-Jewish female composer during the Second World War, she experienced a brutal “unperson-ing” during her artistic activities then, and deserves much wider recognition now.

Asher Ian Armstrong is on the piano faculty of the University of Toronto. A  performer and Cambridge-published scholar, he holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (MM) and the University of Toronto (DMA).