REVIEWS
The Latest Review from the American Record Guide, Jan/Feb 2025 Issue
This is Polk’s second volume of Chaminade piano music. I enjoyed the first (Steinway 30037, Jan/Feb 2015) and it made my Critic’s Choice list for 2015. This release continues in the same line.
Cecil Chaminade (1857-1944) wrote about 400 compositions. She was a renowned pianist who amassed a fortune from her world wide concert performances and the publication of her short pieces. Polk has championed female composers all through her admirable discography. She has brought a wealth of great and enjoyable music to our attention, most of which has lived in relative obscurity since it was writ- ten. It would all be for naught if not for the exceptional musical insight and flawless piano technique she brings to these works.
This recital covers the wide range of Chaminade’s music, from Op. 2 to Op. 165. Her best-known little piece, Scarf Dance’, is here, along with a couple of larger sets of Variations and another 10 shorter pieces. The central group, about 16 minutes, is her 4 Poémes Provençal (1908). These encapsulate her idiomatic piano writing and her ability to spin out melodies. I am a romantic at heart, and all of this music has beauty and is thoroughly pianistic, if occasionally quite demanding. I can understand why she was so impressive with her own music in concert. It is so good to hear world-class pianists like Polk choose a recital of Chaminade music and play it with all of the seriousness one would expect if the program were music by European male composers of the time. That does not mean the requisite panache is missing. I can only hope for a third volume of Chaminade from Polk in less time than it took between the first and second volumes.
HARRINGTON
Copyright Record Guide Publications Jan/Feb 2025
And Farrenc, who was respected and successful in her own time, may well have found just the needed modern champion in Joanne Polk, who performs on this CD with utter dedication and complete involvement in the material.
Read the entire review HERE.
Conviction and mastery, Joanne Polk focuses her pioneering spirit on the music of the 19th-century French Louise Farrenc.
..this well-engineered and thoughtfully programmed release is first choice for anyone seeking an introduction to Farrenc’s solo piano output..
Read the entire review HERE.
The American pianist Joanne Polk is a colleague of Louise Farrenc, but in our time. She teaches as a professor at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. Her recordings are entirely dedicated to compositions by female composers, for example the American composer Amy Beach or Clara Schumann. Joanne Polk plays on a modern Steinway, but pays attention to the rhetoric of the original sound. She has a differentiated and very clear tone, which serves the music very well. When paying close attention, one notices that Farrenc developed a pianistic approach of her own, on the border line between Chopin and Liszt. Highly recommended!
Pianist Joanne Polk joined violist Rebecca Young, violinist Todd Phillips and cellist Timothy Eddy. Polk, in particular, made tantalizing use of rubato in the slow movement, leading the ensemble to some of its most shimmering moments.
Beach’s musical imagination ranged widely. Nearly everything here is rewarding: all of it is magnificently played.
“By the Still Waters” is Volume 1 of the solo piano music of Amy Beach, a pianist of considerable prowess (you can hear it in the music) and a composer who is at last finding the audience she deserves. Pianist Joanne Polk plays beautifully.
Polk gives her usual elegant performances. She is a splendid pianist, sensitive musically, supple in phrase, brilliant in technique.
Polk has been an advocate of female composers for many years. This is her first CD for the Steinway label, and it is tip to the high standards I have come to expect: superior sound, excellent booklet, repertoire a little outside of the mainstream, and of course, brilliant pianism.
The Piano Sonata is a wonderful composition, inventive and well-constructed to be sure, but a solid and satisfying romantic piano work. We tend to view Chaminade through the lens of the small piece. Polk, based on her performance here, would be completely at home with any of the piano sonatas by the great romantic composers. Her technique and interpretive abilities bring Chaminade’s sonata to life in 17 pleasant minutes. It should be heard far more often.
The Etudes display a wide range of piano techniques and are akin to the concert-level etudes by Chopin and Liszt. These are not run-of-the-mill piano exercises. Chaminade was a melodist as well as an excellent pianist, and that’s what sets her etudes above most. It takes someone of Polk’s abilities to bring these off. The character pieces lighten the mood effectively and round off this exceptional program.
Joanne Polk captures the technical splendor and passion of Cécile Chaminade’s music as well as Steinway piano’s incomparable sound with absolute brilliance.
Polk and the Larks played their hearts out. We in the audience shouted ourselves hoarse with gratitude.