Juliana Soltis & Ruoting Li: American Woman
Navona Records

The challenges pioneering women composers faced are brought vividly to life by the works on American Woman, all rapturously performed by cellist Juliana Soltis and pianist Ruoting Li. Compounding matters, some of the composers were Black and thus had to contend with race-related issues that made it even more difficult for their music to be heard and accepted. All such details bolster the value of American Woman in offering a wonderful opportunity to newly appreciate the great music Mary Howe, Amy Beach, Margaret Bonds, Helen Crane, Dorothy Rudd Moore, and Florence Price created. It's telling that the general tone of the release isn't downtrodden but instead, as it should be, triumphant. That these artists found ways to persevere and make the contributions they did speaks mightily to their determination and resilience.

Parts of the programme are familiar, others less so, but all deserve to be heard, especially when they're performed with sincerity and affection by the recital duo. Soltis made her recording debut in 2017 with Entrez, le Diable! (Acis) and followed it two years later with the Bach-themed Going Off Script (King Street Records). Both are understandably dear to her heart, yet American Woman feels particularly special, something the cellist herself acknowledges in saying, “I feel that I have been preparing all my life to play this music.” The intense affection she has for the material is heard in her eloquent performances with Li, which range from romantic and rhapsodic to fierce and fiery. The two heighten the impact of the material with musicianship pitched at an exceptionally high level.

Shorter settings—Price's set-closing Adoration and Bonds's Troubled Water, to cite two examples—alternate with longer ones such as Howe's ten-minute Ballade Fantasque and Moore's Dirge and Deliverance, at sixteen minutes the album's longest. With four standalone pieces mixed with two multi-movement works, American Woman is a satisfying mix in that regard too. Howe's a perfect example of a woman composer whose contributions to American music were recognized during her lifetime—she appeared alongside Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein in Madeline Goss's 1952 Modern Music-Makers: Our American Composers—but eventually fell by the wayside. Written five years after graduating from the Peabody Institute, Ballade Fantasque (1927) evidences some of the tendencies heard in the other works too, specifically the incorporation of non-classical styles such as gospel and jazz. A melancholy, romantic feel permeates the piece, such feeling intensified by the sorrowful ache of Soltis's expressions, as it wends its way through passages marked by delicacy and passion. Languorous one moment, wild the next, Ballade Fantasque is an emotional travelogue of high drama and intense feeling.

Similar to Howe, Crane was deemed credible enough as a composer to merit inclusion in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians in 1905, and her Symphonic Suite was even performed by the Berlin Philharmonic. Written in 1918, her Six Idylls for Cello and Piano is naturally reverie-like and often swoon-inducing; it's also distinguished by contrasts in tone and adventurous gestures. Whereas the first and fourth venture down unexpected harmonic pathways that impart a destabilizing quality to the material, an expressive romanticism pervades the second and a robust drive animates the sixth. As Beach taught herself to compose by studying books on music theory and orchestration and the works of other composers, Three Pieces, composed in 1898 for violin and piano and transcribed by her for cello and piano five years later, might be seen as an homage to Fauré, Brahms, and Chopin, though Beach's own voice as a composer comes through in the material's harmonies and song-like character. In “La Captive,” gentle piano ripples and sombre cello phrases evoke the graceful majesty of the French composer's music; “Berceuse” exudes romantic elegance, “Mazurka” a lighthearted dance tone.

After graduating from Howard University, Moore was awarded a fellowship to study with Nadia Boulanger in France. Homesickness returned her to the United States, however, where she met and married Kermit Moore in 1964 and became with him founding members of the Society of Black Composers. He being a cellist, Dorothy wrote several pieces for him, including the aptly titled Dirge and Deliverance (1971/1980). Described as “an existential battle in which the cello struggles to free itself from the oppression of the piano” (and literally does so during an extended, freewheeling cadenza), the piece is often infused with despair yet nevertheless concludes with the cello victorious.

Bonds and Price share more than representation on the album. The former's family home in Chicago played hosted to great Black cultural figures such as Langston Hughes and Price, who stayed with the family when her second marriage ended and eventually became a teacher to Margaret. Intent on crafting a personalized style that would draw from the Black musical traditions that had shaped her life, Bonds created Troubled Water, which she transcribed from the closing movement of her own Spiritual Suite in 1964. Using the traditional spiritual “Wade in the Water” as a template, she created a haunting statement that's bluesy, gospel-tinged, and, in its subtle rhythmic swing, jazzy. Buoyed by its intoxicating melodic lines and tranquil, hymn-like aura, Price's Adoration (1951) makes for a gorgeous exit to the album.

November 2024