Four Centuries of Great Music March 15, 2026 Recent Releases of Music by Women Composers

March is women’s history month and I thought I would share on this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music some recent releases of music by women composers.  

I will open with music by Elsa Barraine.

Elsa Barraine with Born on February 13, 1910 to a pianist mother who also sang in the chorus of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, one of the most prominent French orchestras of the era and cellist father  who was the principal cellist at the Paris Opera.  And her older sister was a student at the Paris Conservatoire.  As a child she received piano lessons from her mother, her sister took her to harmony classes at the Paris Conservatoire and her father brought her to rehearsals and performances of the Paris Opera.

Elsa entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 9, bypassing
the conventional educational route.  She received  little general education as a child, a condition that would bother her throughout her life.  At the age of 17 she entered the composition class of Paul Dukas, to whom she became very close. She had classes with Olivier Messiaen with whom she became close friends.   In 1929, at only 19 years of age, she won
the Grand Prix de Rome composition prize – only the fourth
woman to receive the accolade.   She studied in Italy for 3 years but returned to France regularly because it was a harrowing time to be in Italy. Mussolini’s mission to remake and restore national greatness was seeping into every Italian’s life. Newspapers which opposed the policies of the regime were burned in the streets. Blackshirts enforced order with violence and intimidation, targeting socialists and communists in particular.   As if dealing with the culture shock of Italian fascism wasn’t stressful enough, the room Barraine was given was small and dirty. Early in her stay she wrote to Dukas that it was a “rat’s nest.”
In addition to composing,  she decided to supplement her lack of general education. She began absorbing all she could from the art and architecture surrounding her in Rome, and she read voraciously, devouring works from a wide ranges of countries.

She returned to France to first work as an accompanist and choral director in addition to her composing and in 1935 she took a position with the Orchestre national.   

Barraine responded to a state commission by composing her Second Symphony in 1938, Europe stood on the brink of the Second World War. One week after the premiere of the work by the Orchestre national, France was a signatory to the Munich Agreement, which ceded the Sudetenland to Hitler’s forces. An all-too real situation for the young composer, who was poised to join the Communist Party, and who gave the subtitle of “Voïna” (“war” in Russian) to her symphony.   It is in three movements.   The first movement marked Adagio - Allegro moderato is a menacing sonata-form declaration of war.  The second movement marked lento is a slow funeral march.  And the third movement marked finale allegretto is in the form of a folk dance, and carries the sense of rebirth.

Here is a performance of Elsa Barraine: Symphony No 2, subtitled Voïna by Cristian Măcelaru  conducting the Orchestre National de France from the album Elsa Barraine: Symphonies No. 1 & 2, Song-Koï, Les Tziganes which was released just  this past month on February 20th Warner Classics
Lay see-gahn

Let’s continue this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music which is featuring an exploration of the recent releases of music by women composers with DANA SUESSE


Nadine Dana Suesse was born in Kansas City in December 3, 1909 and was a talented artist in a wide range of fields, from an early age, creating her own poetry, dancing ballet, drawings, doll costumes, paintings, and plays.  When she grew too tall for ballet, she began piano lessons. While still a child, Suesse toured the Midwest vaudeville circuits in an act centered on dancing and piano playing. During the recital, she would ask the audience for a theme, and then weaving it into something of her own. 

She was already performing her own compositions on radio by the age of thirteen. In 1926, she and her mother moved to New York City where when she studied piano performance with Alexandre Siloti, who was a pupil of Franz Liszt and composition with Rubin Goldmark in New York.

Suesse began to create larger-scale pieces from which she would extrapolate a phrase and then set that tune to words, collaborating with a lyricist. And example of this is when she pulled the second theme of her work for piano and orchestra called "Jazz Nocturne” which became her first popular hit  "My Silent Love”.  She collaborated with lyricist Eddie Heyman on "You Ought to Be in Pictures" in addition to other hits, including "Ho-Hum" which became a best seller for Bing Crosby.   Before turning to popular music and composing hit songs , she composed more extended serious compositions.  Her Concerto in Three Rhythms was commissioned and performed by Paul Whiteman at Carnegie Hall and caused her to be nicknamed “Gershwin Girl”. 

While composing popular hit tunes with various lyricists, she continued to write more serious music.   And after the second world war Suesse moved to Paris for three years to study composition with Nadia Boulanger.

Because she was so associated with popular music, her classical works struggled to gain acceptance.


Today I will share with you her CONCERTO FOR TWO PIANOS AND ORCHESTRA.  Dana Suesse worked on her concerto for two pianos and orchestra between 1934 and 1941. Eugene Goossens conducted the premiere of the concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in Cincinnati on 10 December 1943

This of course was written before her studies with Nadia Boulanger. Suesse had taught herself orchestration and wished to orchestrate the concerto herself, which explains the work’s startlingly unconventional orchestration. It is, however, also possible that her piecemeal education and lack of experience gave the work a freshness and a formal freedom of color and texture that a well-rounded academic education might well have restricted. 

The concerto is in 4 movements marked Allegro, Adagio, Scherzo and the finale is marked Lento e con espressione, Allegro moderato.  The first movement of the concerto plunges the listener into a mysterious atmosphere from the very first notes, with vibraphone and harp echoing the timpani. The appearance of the theme, however, removes any doubt as to the concerto’s Romantic inspiration, as it is underlined by a carpet of strings, soaring passages from the flute, and cymbals to mark the climax. A Romantic concerto indeed, but one permeated with modern harmonies and jazz chords. Suesse also spotlights various orchestral players by giving them solo passages.   The main theme of the second movement inevitably evokes the cushioned and honeyed atmosphere of a Hollywood romance.  The frenzied third movement scherzo displays the virtuosity of the orchestra as a whole in a bravura piece.


DANA SUESSE  (1909-1987)
CONCERTO FOR TWO PIANOS AND ORCHESTRA
1 I. Allegro 
2 II. Adagio 
3 III. Scherzo 
4 IV. Finale. Lento e con espressione. Allegro moderato  

LUDMILA BERLINSKAYA
ARTHUR ANCELLE
ORCHESTRE VICTOR HUGO
JEAN-FRANÇOIS VERDIER CONDUCTOR (1-4)
AMERICAN DREAM
Alpha Classics

To finish out this first hour of this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music featuring recent releases of music by women composers I wold like to play excerpts from FANNY HENSEL’s piano suite “Das Jahr”

FANNY HENSEL

DAS JAHR, H.385 (EXCERPTS)
3 February. Scherzo 
4 May. Frühlingslied 
5 Juni. Serenade 
6 September. Am Flusse 

Piano Heroines
BY CLAIRE HUANGCI

Because of societal pressures, Fanny Hensel, the sister of Felix Mendelssohn was unable to compose professionally but continued to do so on a more intimate level. Whilst her musical outlook was progressive, she did not particularly feel she had strength enough to develop her ideas in larger forms. It was because of this, she told her brother Félix on February 1, 1835, that she felt attracted to smaller structures and to the art song or Lied in particular. In this spirit, she set down a musical description of each month of the year in Das Jahr, a suite for
piano and gave it as a Christmas present to her husband Wilhelm, in 1841 – thirty-five years before Tchaikovsky wrote his
own The Seasons piano suite.  Pianist Claire Huangci in her album “Piano Heroines” released at the end of January shared with us 4 of the months from this piano suite.

Here is a performance of February-Scherzo, May-Frühlingslied, June-Serenade and September-Am Flusse from FANNY HENSEL: Das Jahr by pianist Claire Huangci from her album Piano Heroines which was released on January 30th of this year.

I would like to open this second hour of this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music featuring recent releases of music by women composers with a newly composed work Cocteau by Irish  composer Rhona Clarke from Isabelle O’Connell’s album Cocteau released a little over a week ago on March 6th.

The initial spark for this Cocteau album began with a series of online conversations during the COVID pandemic between O’Connell and Clarke. They had been paired through the CMC Colleagues initiative, a scheme run by the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin, Ireland that connects Irish composers and performers in an effort to encourage new collaborations. As a result of these conversations, Clarke decided to compose a set of pieces inspired by French artist Jean Cocteau’s drawings. After a previous visit to the two Cocteau museums dedicated to this iconoclastic artist in the south of France, Clarke had developed a fascination with, as she put it, “the work of this complete artist: poems, drawings, films, short novels.”  Rhona Clarke: Cocteau is in 6 movements: Antigone, Portrait I, Blood of a poet, Orpheus, Portrait II and Oedipus.


Rhona Clarke: Cocteau - I. Antigone 
Rhona Clarke: Cocteau - II. Portrait I 
Rhona Clarke: Cocteau - III. Blood of a poet 
Rhona Clarke: Cocteau - IV. Orpheus 
Rhona Clarke: Cocteau - V. Portrait II 
Rhona Clarke: Cocteau - VI. Oedipus 

Isabelle O’Connell, piano 
Cocteau
Divine Art Records

Next is another recently composed work, in this case to celebrate the semiquincentennial of the Unites States, the Lady Liberty Suite by Karen LeFrak from her album American Promise also released a little over a week ago on March 6th.   The work is in three movements: Arrival, The City and A New Land.

Here is Lady Liberty Suite by Karen LeFrak as performed by London Symphony Orchestra conducted by William Ross fromm the album American Promise     KL2 Recordings/Naxos



I would like to to close this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music featuring recent releases of music by women composers with Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, Op. 22 in an arranged for clarinet and piano by Mark Thiel.

The work is in three movements: movement 1 marked Andante molto; movement 2 marked Allegretto: Mit zartem vortrage and movement 3 marked Leidenschaftlich schnell

Clara Schumann’s Three Romances as violin-and-piano pieces for Joseph Joachim, longtime friend of the family and another of those figures whose name forms a connective tissue through the lives of Clara and Robert Schumann.

The beautifully curled, sonorous opening to the first of the Romances is suggestive of song, especially when played on the clarinet. And Clara knows exactly how to make her partner shine, the accompaniment unobtrusive but supportive.  What links all three of these Romances is an unerring sense of rubato. After the predominantly lyrical first piece, the skittishness of the second is a delightful surprise; the third then sweeps in, its quietly driving agitation reminiscent of her husband Robert, before the mood lightens, the opening idea now underpinned by detached
piano writing.

When Clara and Joachim toured the Romances, one critic from the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung damned them with male chauvinistic praise: “All three pieces display an individual character conceived in a truly sincere manner and written in a delicate and fragrant hand”

Clara Schumann: Three Romances, Op. 22: I. Andante molto (arranged for clarinet and piano by Mark Thiel)
Clara Schumann: Three Romances, Op. 22: II. Allegretto: Mit zartem vortrage (arranged for clarinet and piano by Mark Thiel)
Clara Schumann: Three Romances, Op. 22: III. Leidenschaftlich schnell (arranged for clarinet and piano by Mark Thiel)