Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of La Pietà

Angèle Dubeau, leader of the La Pietà string ensemble, all of whose performers are women (photograph by Laurence Labat, courtesy of Crossover Media)

Almost exactly a month ago, Analekta released a new album to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the all-female string ensemble La Pietà, led by Canadian violinist Angèle Dubeau. All of my past listening experiences with this group took place when I was writing for Examiner.com, and it appears to have involved only two recordings. The earlier of these was the album in the Portrait series that consisted entirely of music by John Adams. The other was the Game Music album, which included nine tracks featuring music for major video games, such as Tetris, Final Fantasy, Halo 3, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed, and Angry Birds.

The title of the anniversary album is simply Elle. It consists of fifteen tracks, each devoted to a different composer, all of whom are female. Only a few of the composers are familiar as a result of my efforts to keep up with different strategies for exploring repertoire. Only two of the composers on the album triggered recognition of past listening experiences: Hildegarde of Bingen (from the twelfth century) and Lera Auerbach, whose work I have been following for almost as long as I have been doing this writing.

Note that those last two sentences begin with “Only.” The fact is that it is hard for me to shake off the feeling that, when it comes to raising consciousness of female composers, this album is too late and a (Canadian) dollar short. Indeed, when one looks back at Dubeau’s history, one discovers that she released at least five of those Portrait albums, all of which were devoted to male composers. Furthermore, the overall rhetorical ambiance of the entire Elle album never seems to rise above the level of sentimental mush. Anyone who listened to Isata Kanneh-Mason playing the music of Sofia Gubaidulina last night (or read this morning’s account of that performance) will probably agree with me that no serious female composer deserves to be treated as a source of “sentimental mush!”

Personally, I feel that listeners that wish to experience a more informative account of female composers will do better to consult the recordings Sarah Cahill is making under the title The Future is Female, the first of which will be available this coming Friday.