Home Listening - Rhian Samuel, Chineke! Orchestra and Beethoven Unleashed

The Guardian 0

Welsh composer Rhian Samuel features on two fine new discs; six composers impress on Chineke!’s latest; and Beethoven’s epic 1808 concert revisited

• The Welsh composer Rhian Samuel (b1944) tirelessly supported the cause of female composers long before it became fashionable, co-editing The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (1994). Now her own works are winning proper recognition. In Clytemnestra (BIS), soprano Ruby Hughes, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Jac van Steen give new life to Samuel’s powerful, seven-movement work for soprano and orchestra (here coupled with Mahler and Berg). Commissioned by the BBC NOW in 1994 but neglected since, it explores – with rare insight, passionately expressed by Hughes – the motives that led Clytemnestra to murder her husband, Agamemnon.

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