Cécile Chaminade and Her Contemporaries play Chaminade in Bloomington, MN

The reputation of French composer
Cécile Chaminade
has gone through several bounces. She was popular enough at one time that there were some 200
Chaminade
clubs in the U.S. alone, but was then almost forgotten for several decades.
is now on the way back, and listeners interested in her music will definitely want to hear his 2025 historical-recordings release. A major highlight is the set of seven recordings made in London in 1901 by
herself. These have been issued before occasionally, but the transfers here by
Andrew Hallifax
and
Karl Jenkins
(presumably not the same person as the composer of
The Armed Man
, etc.) are excellent, and indeed, the
records sound as good as recordings on the album from a couple of decades later. More important,
's playing really deserves to be heard this way. The recordings are among the first made by a classical composer whose music was shaped in the 19th century, and indeed, they were among the first full-scale classical recordings made by any pianist. They are strikingly lively, and all the other recordings on the album (they're mostly British, with multiple entries by the Australian
Una Bourne
) struggle to meet her standard. Those who might have heard
in person seem to do better than the later ones; the recordings stretch as far forward as 1950. There is a lot of
here that will be unfamiliar even to fans of the composer, and a variety of pianists who are not well represented on reissues. It would be interesting to hear a parallel recording of
performances from the French-speaking world. This is, at any rate, a highly listenable entry contributing to the growing understanding of an important composer. ~ James Manheim