Genova & Dimitrov Piano Duo Plays Amy Beach

courtesy of Naxos of America

This coming Friday the German cpo label will release an album of the complete works of Amy Beach for piano duo (both two pianos and four hands on one keyboard). The performers are the Genova & Dimitrov piano duo, whose members are Aglika Genova and Liuben Dimitrov, both Bulgarian. They are primarily active in Europe and have built up a discography of fifteen CDs released by either cpo or Gega, based in Bulgaria. As readers probably expect, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

The Beach catalog of solo piano music is large enough to fill four CDs, which is how Guild released its recordings of Kirsten Johnson. The second CD in this set begins with the Opus 60 “Variations on Balkan Themes.” This was the original version, completed in 1904; and the notes by Norbert Florian Schuck (translated into English by J. Bradford Robinson) for the new Genova & Dimitrov CD describe that version as “Beach’s most extensive and technically demanding composition for solo piano.” Beach revised her score three times, the last version being for two pianos, published in 1942. This is the opening selection on the new CD, and it is the only single-movement composition on the album. Given the rich flood of embellishments that one encounters as the variations unfold, one can appreciate Beach’s decision to unpack that content and divide it across two separate instruments.

This monumental offering opens the album and is followed by the composer’s earliest duo composition. In 1883, at the age of sixteen, when she went by the name Amy Marcy Cheney, she composed three short pieces for four hands on one keyboard. The second of these would resurface in her Opus 47 four-hand composition Summer Dreams (which is the last selection on the album); but the full set was only recently published by Chris A. Trotman. In that edition the three pieces are coupled with a new edition of the two-piano version of Opus 60. The other selection on the new album is the Opus 104 suite for two pianos, consisting of four movements based on Irish melodies.

The result is a release that couples a highly-informed essay about Beach with thoroughly engaging accounts of four compositions, one of which, having been dismissed as “juvenilia,” had not previously enjoyed the benefit of publication: just “the right stuff” for those that eagerly follow the Beach repertoire and those just beginning to get curious about her.