REVIEWS
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.