The way pianist Virginia Eskin tells it, it didn't begin as a conscious crusade.
"I was assigned to look her up. Immediately I saw the merits in this long life and it overwhelmed me that I had never heard of her. Here I had had a classical upbringing, including not only all the proper lessons but a lot of unusual repertoire. I never had the standard Beethoven sonatas; what I had were things like the 32 Variations and the `Hammerklavier.' So why hadn't she been part of my musical diet? MacDowell had, even `Dvorsky' (in reality Josef Hoffman). I was outraged."That was in 1971, and the "she" is Amy Beach, the turn-of-the-century New England composer whose music Eskin has championed for nearly two decades.
Within a few years she had undertaken the first extensive survey of Beach's piano music on records - some of which are now finding their way to compact disc - and through Northeastern Records (originally an offshoot of her activities at Boston's Northeastern University) helped sponsor first recordings of some of the songs and chamber music.
Nor did her advocacy end there. As an active performer she began including Beach's music on her recital programs and in 1976 gave the first performance in the Boston area of the Op. 45 Piano Concerto since Beach herself last performed it with the Boston Symphony in 1917. Reached by phone at her
West Canton Street townhouse, moreover, she reveals that she is on her way downtown to lobby for a plaque on Beach's home.
In the intervening years Eskin has gone on to perform the concerto with the orchestras of San Francisco, Rochester and Baltimore, and this week brings it to Salt Lake City for performances with the Utah Symphony Friday and Saturday, Dec. 1-2, at 8 p.m. in Symphony Hall. Those concerts will also feature her as soloist in Beethoven's Choral Fantasy as well as the Utah Symphony Chorus in two other out-of-the-way pieces, Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Christmas Carols and Lili Boulanger's "Ancient Buddhist Prayer."
Conductor for the occasion will be Joseph Silverstein, Eskin's partner on some of those Northeastern recordings. "He was a very willing victim," she says of him in the days when, as part of a trio in which the other member was her then-husband, principal BSO cellist Jules Eskin, she first introduced him to Beach's music.
"I know of no other male conductor who is doing anything like this," she adds of Silverstein's focus on women in this season's Utah Symphony concerts. Besides the Boulanger, upcoming subscription programs include pieces by Clara Schumann, Germaine Tailleferre and Joan Tower. And of course the Beach Concerto.
Born in New Hampshire in 1867, Amy Marcy Cheney made her debut with the Boston Symphony in 1885, a piano prodigy who began composing at age 4. That same year she married the eminent Boston surgeon Henry Harris Aubrey Beach and from then until her death in 1944 composed under the name "Mrs. H.H.A. Beach." In addition to the concerto, her output from those years includes a symphony - the first to be written by an American woman - a mass, an opera ("Cabildo," completed in 1932), a string quartet, a piano quintet, a piano trio, a violin sonata and numerous songs and piano pieces.
"You look at the pictures of her," Eskin observes, "and you see this dumpy, plain little woman. You would never imagine the music that flowed out of her, so willowy and passionate."
Also impressive is her stylistic breadth. In the piano music one can hear the influence of Chopin and Debussy. But, as Eskin points out, the concerto - in four movements - is clearly modeled on Brahms, in addition to which I hear traces of Dvorak and MacDowell. The "Gaelic" Symphony, by contrast, looks to Liszt for its inspiration, as well as ancient Irish melodies. And although the String Quartet, from 1929, comes from a time when she was increasingly fascinated by chromaticism and impressionism, Beach herself claimed it was based on Eskimo themes!
But even at her most derivative, Beach never sounds stale. Whatever the genre, there is always a freshness about her writing that bespeaks not only a lively creative impulse but an enthusiasm for life.
"She seems to have been happy," Eskin says of Beach's 25-year marriage. "In some ways she was American-trained by default, in that she didn't travel as others did. Here she was, married to this rich, powerful husband, and as soon as he died she took off for Europe. So she was obviously waiting. But his locking her in a cage may not have been such a bad thing. Clara Schumann wore herself out traveling, and Martha Argerich says she likes being a pianist but not the life of a pianist."
Plainly there are things in Beach's career Eskin herself can connect with. The offspring of a musical-cum-literary family (her father was an arranger for Paul Whiteman, her mother an editor at Alfred A. Knopf), she was born in Carnegie Hall - not the auditorium but the upstairs studio apartment, where her parents lived.
Later she went on to study in London with Gina Bachauer ("a regal apparition," Eskin says, "in spite of her weight a good role model for a teenage girl") and Leonard Shure. At Marlboro in 1964 she met Jules Eskin and three years later they were married.
As a young mother in Boston she worked hard to balance a teaching and performing career with the demands of family life. Although she admits to having "scoped down my operations" in recent years, she still lectures on women and other minority composers, pops up regularly on National Public Radio and collaborates from time to time with everyone from choreographer Violette Verdy to Julia Child. For a time after her marriage broke up, she even ran a bed-and-breakfast out of her home.
"If anything some of that worked against me," Eskin says of her non-mainstream advocacies. "When I signed with Columbia Artists in '77, they said, `We hope you're going to drop that American crap, that women crap.' So what I did was play American men, people like Kirchner, MacDowell and Del Tredici, maybe with some Scarlatti. Then I would sneak some women in on the second half, such as Fanny Mendelssohn along with her brother Felix. This began to filter back to 57th Street and before long a memo came down saying I had to include women composers on every program, that that was now the specialty they were selling me on."
Eskin attributes that not so much to her own moxie but to the quality of the product. "Let's face it, if the music had been schlock you couldn't have given it away. But it was touching, and thanks to the women's movement there's now money in women composers."
Eskin acknowledges there's a part of her that would "love to play a Mozart concerto not by Nannerl or the Beethoven C minor, even with the Beach cadenza." But between "Rhapsodies in Blue" and such esoterica as the Liszt "Malediction" and the Charles Stanford piano concertos, she says it's still a thrill to play the Beach.
"It's a big piece, a big statement, and every time I play it people automatically rise. There's just something about the nobility of the music - it's so exiting, so beautiful. Then they are stunned to realize a woman wrote this and they've never heard it. I'm thrilled to think I've been instumental in that."
Tickets to the Friday and Saturday concerts range in price from $9 to $27, with student tickets available at $5. For information call the Utah Symphony box office at 533-NOTE.
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(ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)
CDs of Symphony, Mass swell Beach discography
Though still spotty, the Amy Beach discography appears to be growing by the day.
Recently the Library of Congress included the "Gaelic" Symphony in Vol. 4 of its Our Musical Past series (OMP-105, CD or cassette) - unfortunately cut but comprehensively annotated. And an even more recent Newport Classic CD (NCD-60008) of the early Grand Mass in E flat major reveals a work like no other in the world. ("A happy Verdi Requiem," the notes call it, but when did that composer combine a vocal trio with harp, as Beach does in the "Laudamus te," or give us a "Credo" in 3/4 time?)
The String Quartet can be had on Leonarda LPI-111, with Mary Louise Boehm's pioneering recording of the Piano Concerto ostensibly available as part of a three-cassette Murray Hill box, "The Piano Concerto in America."
However, the best introduction to Beach's music I know is probably Northeastern NR-9004-CD, a single-CD collection of the songs and violin and piano pieces, winningly performed by Eskin, Silverstein and mezzo D'Anna Fortunato. If that whets your appetite, you might want to try NR-223-CD, which includes more Beach a la Eskin, or Silverstein's recording of the Violin Sonata (New World 268), in this instance with pianist Gilbert Kalish. - W.S.G.