Linda Kouvaras: Piano Music, Chamber Works and Songs, Volume Three
The Australian Linda Kouvaras (b. 1960) – pianist and musicologist as well as composer – adopts an explicitly feminist viewpoint in her work. She describes She, Who Should Have Been a Queen as a song-cycle, but in fact the text, by Antoinette Halloran, presents a series of dramatic scenas that radically re-assess the fates of a series of female characters from famous operas, the edgy humour and familiar musical language only slightly softening the implied social commentary. To the Lighthouse for brass quintet has, improbably, both a feminist subtext and the engaging buoyancy of a Baroque canzona. As with many other Australian composers, Kouvaras’ piano music has a strong sense of space and place, and her expansive Bundanon Suite uses virtuosic piano-writing to present a series of sketches of the landscapes around the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales, with lyrical, elegiac melodic lines that soar over freewheeling piano textures.
Antoinette Halloran, soprano
Coady Green, piano
Lyrebird Brass
Listen To This Recording:
She, Who Should Have Been a Queen for Soprano and Piano (2024)* (37:17)
- I. Lady Macbeth on a Soapbox at Last (after Verdi’s Macbeth) (6:19)
- II. The Nurse’s Curse (after Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet) (4:25)
- III. Pinkerton’s Lament (after Puccini’s Madama Butterfly) (4:01)
- IV. Buttercup and the Cruel Stomp of Time (after Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore) (7:53)
- V. Just Gilda (after Verdi’s Rigoletto) (2:49)
- VI. Musetta’s Schmaltz (after Puccini’s La bohème) (5:24)
- VII. The Snake’s Persssspective: A Revisionist Commentary on The Drover’s Wife (after Mills’ The Ghost Wife) (6:26)
- To the Lighthouse for Brass Quintet (2022)* (5:37)
Bundanon Suite for Piano (1999) (28:38)
- I. Secrets of the Amphitheatre (5:10)
- II. Shimmering Haze on the Shoalhaven (6:41)
- III. Lament for Helen (4:59)
- IV. Haunted Point (5:36)
- V. Bundanon Rhapsody (3:03)
- VI. Old Forest Growth (3:09)
*First Recordings
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.