Rita Strohl: Volume 2, Musique de chambre

In a world where life as a female composer and musician was deemed largely incompatible with raising a family, Rita Strohl stood out. Born in France in 1865, Strohl successfully combined her era’s overwhelming expectations of motherhood with a clutch of chamber works that defined her as solidly Romantic in outlook. César Franck and Saint-Saëns both loom large in the Grande Fantaisie-Quintette or the Trio No. 2 (“Deuxième Trio”), both works confidently and deftly crafted, if derivative. Yet move forward a couple of decades to the final years of the 19th century and you’ll hear how Strohl’s style takes a sharp turn, making contact “with her own time”, as she described this evolution in one of her many writings. Although Strohl now wrote mostly for voice, her 1898 trio for piano, cello and clarinet, Arlequin et Colombine, shows how her music began to take on the flavors of Fauré in its flowing melodic lines and sophisticated harmonies. Just five years later, however, Strohl fully embraced impressionism with her Ravelian piano work, Musiques sur l’eau, based on what she termed the “six-note scale” or series of whole tones. The music seems to reflect a composer at last comfortable in her own artistic skin, her music taking flight in ways that her earlier work simply failed to do. It's hard to imagine this music performed with greater skill and dedication: an admirable revival of a fascinating composing voice.