Reviews for Hélène de Montgeroult - Etudes

Two possible surprises lurk in my album of the week. One is that the pianist Clare Hammond, noted for her muscular power, can also touch the keys as if stroking a Siamese cat. The bigger surprise may come from the music: 29 études by Hélène de Montgeroult, a noblewoman who supposedly avoided jail during the French Revolution by moving her judges to tears after improvising variations on La Marseillaise. Professorship at the newly formed Paris Conservatoire followed.

Listening to the subtle simplicity of this music (first rediscovered in the 1990s), I almost shed a tear myself. Conceived as technical exercises in playing with crossed hands and other niceties, these pieces reveal an imagination and vitality that easily lift them onto a higher plane.

For music published in 1816 and chiefly written some time before, it’s also adventurous, tied to classical forms yet with a romantic spirit recalling later figures like Mendelssohn and Schumann. Above all, this is music of very high quality; and it falls under Hammond’s fingers with a thoughtful beauty that should make many new friends both for herself and for the composer she so excellently serves.

Where will Clare Hammond pop up next? If she is not championing new works and recording their world premieres, she is appearing as the young Miss Shepherd in the film of Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van or giving us the complete music for keyboard by Josef Myslivecek (1737-81). Now she turns her attention to the extraordinary Hélène-Antoinette-Marie de Nervo de Montgeroult (1764-1836), a student of Clementi, an aristocratic survivor of the French Revolution, pianist, composer and author of a famous piano method: her Cours complet pour l'enseignement du forte-piano was published in 1816 in three volumes.

Montgeroult has not been entirely ignored on disc. Her complete sonatas have been recorded with great panache by Nichols Horvath, for instance (Grand Piano, 1/22), and there is an excellent mixed programme of her works by Edna Stern (Orchid), which I welcomed in the April 2017 issue. Montgeroult, in my opinion, deserves every bit of the attention she is now so belatedly receiving. As Hammond says in her own (elegantly written and diligently researched) booklet, of the 29 études she has selected from the Cours complet, 'not only are they of similar quality to the music by composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, they are stylistically so advanced as to call into question our perceptions of where the "classical" and "romantic" periods fall'.

Take the very first étude on the disc (No 37 in G). Its cross-hand device was used half a century later by Fridolin Braungardt in his Waldesrauschen (aka Idyll), a piece of romantic salon music found in many a Victorian piano stool. No 36 in F which, like all 114 études, comes with a note on its intent (pour apprendre à lier le chant') sounds like a Beethoven bagatelle, No 35 in C minor like a sprightly CPE Bach toccata, No 34 in F like a Chopin Prelude, No 82 in C minor could be by Alkan, and so on. Elsewhere in Clare Hammond's judiciously ordered selection, you might detect prescient hints of Schumann, Brahms or even Debussy. The shortest si 0'53", the longest 4'37". These are no dull finger drills like those of Cramer (a pupil of Montgeroult) but studies which, like Chopin's Opp 10 and 25 published ni the 1830s, combine technical exercises with musicof depth and poetry.

Nimbly executed, sensitively phrased and beautifull recorded (Wvastone Concert Hall), Clare Hammond has left all pianophiles in her debt. 'How can music of this quality and vision', she asks, be forgotten so comprehensively for so long?' Indeed. An early contender for next year's Gramophone Awards.

Born in 1864 (younger than Mozart, older than Beethoven), Hélène de Montgeroult, celebrated for her superlative playing in private salons, was a French aristocrat and so not permitted a performing career. After she married a Marquis and had undergone secret missions, kidnapping, escape and widowhood, there came the Revolution: she was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror, but after improvising variations on the Marseillaise before the Committee of Public Safety she was released. She then became the first woman to be professor of piano at Paris's Conservatoire de Musique and left a substantial catalogue of piano music on her death in 1836, including the gigantic piano method from which there 29 etudes are taken.

Clare Hammond's selection is well chosen and suitably contrasted, a fine representation of a composer whose music is more akin to early Chopin than to Mozart or Beethoven. These are seriously demanding pieces, yet Hammond delivers them with a smooth and mellifluous touch, capturing the music's twilit subtleties and silken textures as if it's second nature. While the music does not have quite the glitter, extreme contrasts or wild imagination of Chopin's etudes, it draws you in and exerts a fascinating magnetism. Hopefully this valuable project should lead to further exploration of her works.

If you’ve heard the name of French pianist-composer Hélène de Montgeroult (1764 – 1836) at all before now, it’s likely because BBC Radio 3 devoted its ‘Composer of the Week’ slot to her earlier this year. Recordings of her music are rare, those devoted to it rarer still: British pianist Clare Hammond’s new disc of 29 Études from Montgeroult’s Cours complet pour l’enseignement du forte-piano (1816) is only the third in the current catalogue. And yet here we have music that, in the words of Montgeroult expert Jérôme Dorival, provides the ‘missing link between Mozart and Chopin’. As this BIS recording proves, far from being the normal sales puff, this claim turns out to be spot on. Although Montgeroult was less than a decade younger than Mozart, her Études – composed between 1788 and 1812 – are strikingly prescient of the Romanticism of Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann and even Brahms.

How to explain this astonishing neglect? Montgeroult had the misfortune to be born not just a woman in an age when only men were supposed to be composers, but also an aristocrat (her maiden name was Hélène de Nervo) at a time when young ladies did nothing so vulgar as perform in public. Her own playing was restricted to the salons of the nobility, where it was appreciated by a tiny group of connoisseurs. In 1784 she married the Marquis de Montgeroult, but the early 1790s were not a good time for members of the French aristocracy. While attempting to flee to Naples in 1793, the couple were captured by Austrian soldiers, and the Marquis died in custody. On her return to France, Montgeroult only escaped an even worse fate at the hands of the Committee for Public Safety by improvising a set of variations on the Marseillaise: such a talent could prove useful to the new regime, and she was appointed the first woman professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire.

Montgeroult’s tenure at the Conservatoire was brief – she may have left because she was snubbed in favour of a less gifted male colleague to write the official piano course for the institution. Her own Cours complet, published in three volumes, is encyclopaedic in its scope, with a vast number of purely technical exercises (scales, arpeggios and the like), all provided with extensive commentaries, and culminating in an astonishing series of 114 Études. Surviving copies of the Cours complet number only 24 (that by her pupil J.B. Cramer numbers 100 times more), and only since the 1990s – almost entirely thanks to the devoted efforts of Jérôme Dorival – has her output at last become better known to a select group of musicians and, more recently, the wider music-loving public.

Clare Hammond was introduced to Montgeroult’s music as recently as 2019, and she used the opportunity given by the Covid lockdowns to make an intensive study of the composer’s music, carefully searching for the ideal balance between the singing tone which Montgeroult so valued (again anticipating Chopin) and the richness of harmonic shading and heightened expression. There are indications that both the Mendelssohns and the Schumanns may have come into contact with Montgeroult’s teaching legacy during their own years of study, and Hammond’s selection of 29 Études – roughly a quarter of the total collection – contains plenty of examples of their composer’s extraordinary inventiveness and depth of expression. Some of these pieces are intended to focus on strengthening the capability of the left or right hand in particular, others more generally with achieving tonal suppleness and dexterity, yet none come across as mere exercises – a tribute not just to Montgeroult’s visionary talent, but to Hammond’s own careful honing in repertoire that is still scarcely explored by most pianists.

Dip into this disc at any point and you are likely to be amazed, as we were, by the extraordinary richness and variety of expression. The later Études in particular contain music of remarkable maturity, such as No.106 in B major, anticipating Brahms’s late chorale preludes, and the nocturne-like No.110 in A major. There are pieces of astonishing fleetness (nos. 53, 55, 97 and 107), and others of quite remarkable tenderness and emotional depth. No.34 in F major is particularly charming, as is a variant on the same motif in No.36, and the listener is eased into the selection with the gently billowing waves of No.37 in G major. Time and again, you’ll find yourself pinching yourself to realise that these pieces are not better known. Among our own particular favourites are the Schubertian expressivity and textures of No.62 in E flat and No.97 in G minor. But above all, it is the marriage of true cantabile tone and a heightened proto-Romantic sensibility that makes this collection – and Hammond’s performances – so unnervingly astonishing. No doubt at some point soon someone will record the complete collection of Montgeroult’s Études, but it is unlikely that they will match, let alone surpass, Clare Hammond’s achievement on this marvellously recorded new album from BIS. At a time when any minor scraps by great or neglected composers are hailed as discoveries, Hélène de Montgeroult is the real deal: absolutely essential listening, and not just for pianophiles.

This is a beautiful selection of 29 etudes from Hélène de Montgeroult's "Cours complet pour l'enseignement du forte-piano", published in 1816 in three volumes. They certainly influenced the piano method of her pupil, the rather more famous Johann Baptist Cramer.

This is beautiful music, wonderfully recorded. Etude No 38 in A minor could be a Field Nocturne. Others call to mind Mendelssohn or Chopin. Etude No 52 seems like an exercise in narrative storytelling, while the sudden plunge into the minor in No 55 brings music that is remarkably tricky.

Born in pre-Revolutionary France, Montgeroult (1764-1835) participated in secret missions to England with her husband. After imprisonment in Naples, she returned to her native France, where she was imprisoned again during the Reign of Terror before becoming a professor at the Paris Conservatoire - the first woman to occupy a chair there.

Her "Cours complet" includes some 114 Etudes. Each one is listed with its number, key and intent ('Pour jouer...). Like Chopin's, these studies are real pieces of music, and many speak directly to the heart. Hammond is absolutely right to assert that, despite their date, Montgeroult's Etudes sit far closer to the Romantic sensibility than the Classical. Her brilliant performances are clearly the result of deep reflection.

Remarquable improvisatrice - l'exercice de ce talent sur La Marseillaise l'aurait sauvée de l'échafaud -, Hélène de Montgeroult fut l'élève de Hüllmandel, Clementi, Dussek et Reicha. Elle fut aussi, en 1795, la première femme nommée professeur de piano au Conservatoire de Paris. On lui doit, outre les sonates et quelques romances, une production pédagogique capitale, dont la pensée musicale annonce la génération des Schumann, Mendelssohn et Chopin - dont l'Etude op. 10 nº 12 semble prendre racine dans la nº 107 de l'aînée, pour se borner à un exemple. Chacune des cent-quatorze études qui composent les deux derniers volumes du Cours complet pour l'enseignement du forte-piano, publié avant 1820 - Clare Hammond et a sélectionné vingt-neuf - est flanquée d'un sous-titre éclairant. C'est « pour apprendre à toucher les notes mêlées dans la partie droite » qu'on s'essaiera à la nº 37, « pour jouer un chant qui porte son accompagnement de la même main » qu'on jouera la nº 28 (qui gagnerait à être plus nuancée qu'ici) ; la nº 66 est « pour les basses faites à contretemps ». Un text détaille en outre les points techniques abordés dans l'exercice et les conseils permettant de l'interpréter au mieux. Les nuances de l'Etude nº 34 « ne doivent pas dépasser le mezzo forte » ; les syncopes de l'« allegro molto accelerato » de la nº 99 figurent « une hâte, une sorte d'incertitude » qui ne doit pas être comprise comme un « agitato »...

Frappe chez Montgeroult l'attention accordée à l'expression, au « chant » (nºs 36, 62, 107, 110 - même les batteries doivent pouvoir chanter dans les nºs 26 et 41), à ce qu'elle appelle le « ton » (nºs 89, 103, 104), et qui n'est autre qu'une manière d'organiser les plans sonores. A cette aune, Clare Hammond excelle, alliant aisément techniques et expressivité, virtuosité et narrativité. Les contrastes sont là (nº 82 et 97), les lignes internes se perçoivent sans agressivité (nºs 67 et 106). Toujours avec la rigueur et la sobriété préconisées par notre pédagogue, qui demande simplement de « bien rendre les nuances », garantes de l'expressivité.

Jadis totalement ignorée, Hélène de Montgeroult est aujourd'hui devenue presque connue, notamment grâce aux enregistrements de Nicolas Horvath (Grand Piano) et d'Edna Stern (Orchid), sans compter quelques apparitions dans des récitals consacrés aux compositrices. Dans le domaine pianistique, on peut la considérer comme la plus douée des compositeurs français de sa génération, plus personnelle même que Hyacinthe Jadin et Boëly. Outre ses sonates, celle qui fut la première professeure de piano du Conservatoire de Paris a laissé un Cours complet pour l'enseignement du forte-piano, publié en 1816 - au total 114 études. Au contraire de la plupart des études de son temps et même-a-delà, l'argument pédagogique semble presque secondaire par rapport à la quête d'expression musicale. On n'est jamais très loin du premier Beethoven mais aussi de Schubert, qu'elle ne pouvait évidemment pas connaître, et même du Mendelssohn des Lieder ohne Worte, voire parfois de Schumann. C'est que Montgeroult a su capter les tendances les plus originales d'une sensibilité qui parcourait alors toute l'Europe. Dans les vingt-neuf études choisies dans le Cours complet par Clare Hammond, rien n'est médiocre et l'on rencontre fréquemment de vraies merveilles. L'interprétation de ces pièces requièrent une approche délicate fondée sur la qualité du son, l'enchaînement en souplesse des harmonies et l'équilibre entre la clarté de l'exposé et un mystère intime qu'il convient d'aborder en douceur. Clare Hammond avoue avoir longtemps cherché la clé de cet univers - elle l'a trouvée.

Schon mehrfach hat die britische Pianistin Clare Hammond sich unbekannterem Repertoire zugewandt. Auf ihrer neuesten CD widmet sie sich nun der erst in den 1990er Jahren als Komponistin wiederentdeckten Hélène de Montgeroult (1764-1836), die ein bewegtes Leben hatte und als erste Frau eine Professur am Pariser Conservatoire erhielt, aber als Komponistin immer noch "unter dem Radar" lief. Die hier zu hörenden ausgewählten 29 Études entstammen ihrem Lehrbuch "Cours complet ...", das 1816 erschien. Die Etüden selbst stammen aber aus der Zweit zwischen 1788 bis 1822. Es zeigt sich in der sensiblen und atmosphärisch eindringlichen Spielweise von Clare Hammond, dass diese Komponistin die Idee der Etüde nicht als rein technische Ideenwerkstatt betrachtete, sondern - in die Romantik vorausblickend und damit extrem früh in der Geschichte - als Charakterstücke für die Lernenden. So beispielsweise die Etüde Nr. 41, die bereits so klingt wie Schumann oder Mendelssohn. Mit ihrer Schreibweise hat de Montgeroult allerdings dis besagten Komponisten wohl kaum beeinflusst, da sie ihre Musik kaum gekannt haben dürften. Bemerkenswert ist auch die Etüde Nr. 74, die in ihrem Aufbau fast einer Sonate gleicht. Hammond vergräbt sich in die melodiösen Feinheiten, die nicht ohne dramatische Aussagen sind, sondern - ganz im Gegenteil - faszinierende harmonische Wendungen aufweisen, die aus dieser Zeit kaum von anderen Komponisten bekannt sind. Diese CD ist eine wahre Entdeckungsreise. Und die Interpretation von Clare Hammond ist wieder einmal derartig überzeugend, dass diese CD ein wahres Hörerlebnis bietet, wie man es selten mit unbekanntem Repertoire antrifft.

Being a female composer, and getting your music performed, was fraught with difficulties until all too recently. To be an aristocrat too added a further complication. A few women broke free, such as Hélène-Antoinette-Marie de Nervo de Montgeroult (1764-1836), eight years younger than Mozart. The British pianist Clare Hammond, on Hélène de Montgeroult: Etudes (BIS), has recorded 29 of the composer’s studies, showing that this miniature form has artistic worth, as well as the pedagogic value the name implies.

A French virtuoso fortepianist, Montgeroult became a professor at the new Paris Conservatoire in 1795 and wrote her own piano method. In these études, she forged the way for Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and Clara Schumann. Often songlike in the right hand, with turbulent, pulsating left hand accompaniments (as in No 107 in D minor), Montgeroult encapsulates the musical journey from classical to romantic, her artistic compass firmly pointing forward.

Hélène de Montgeroult (1764-1836) is known for her sonatas, which belong to the late classical and early romantic periods and are anything but traditional. No less bold and forward-looking are her Etudes from the Cours Compet pour l’enseignement du forte-piano in three volumes published in 1816. In 1795, the pianist had become the first professor at the newly founded Conservatoire de Paris. With a salary of 2500 livres per year, she was reportedly among the best-paid teachers there.

But she also went down in history as a phenomenal pianist. Baron Louis de Trémont (1779-1852) said that her whole talent was aimed at the expression and the art cantabile. And the pianist of this recording, the British Clare Hammond, says that her music is qualitatively comparable to that of Mendelssohn and Schumann, but at the same time stylistically very advanced. No wonder her 114 Etudes have been associated with the music of Schubert, Chopin and even Brahms.

Clare Hammond accordingly places great emphasis on expression and cantabile, which are the main features of her enchantingly light and sensitive interpretations. And in so doing she would certainly have satisfied the composer who once said, "If singing well is the greatest difficulty on all instruments, one might almost despair of overcoming it on the Forte-Piano, which, deprived of the faculty of sustaining sounds, has given everything when touched; but feeling makes one ingenious, and the need to express what one feels can create resources that escape the mechanic."

There are some discs that go instantly onto the pile of those one wants to listen to again and again, happily, on repeat. At first sight it is surprising that this is one of them.

Until the last few years Hélène de Montgeroult was a composer who had spent a century and a half in obscurity, perhaps because the late 19th and early 20th century musical establishment were wrapped in defensive misogyny, perhaps because she did not write a big collection of symphonies. For whatever reason, her music, covering the period from Haydn to Chopin, was neglected, even though she was the first woman to be Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire. That in itself is more than remarkable for she was close to being guillotined during the Terror as the widow of an aristocratic diplomat. She is said to have survived because she had the wit to demonstrate her pianistic virtuosity by improvising on the Marseillaise for the judges.

She became a venerated institution at the Conservatoire, teaching pianists how to take control of the instrument as it evolved from the fortepiano through to the modern versions, like the Pleyels and Erards, that gradually standardised into something we would recognise as modern. In 1816 she formalised her method into her three volume Complete Course for Education on the Fortepiano, a publication that it is thought Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann knew as they were learning. Given that she and Chopin were in Paris at the same time it seems highly likely that he was familiar with her work too.

There are 114 études alone in the books, of which Clare Hammond presents 29 here. They are much more than exercises, pointing the way to Chopin’s works in the genre and, as Hammond rightly notes, coming very close to the sound world of John Field. The pieces are fastidious, elegant and testing – designed to stretch the player’s technique while teaching how to maintain a musical line, however hard the finger work. Each has a description of the particular quality Mongeroult is looking for the student to achieve. It will not be a shock to find that Clare Hammond passes these tests with consummate ease. She has just the right measure of relentless definition leavened by musical sensitivity to lift the music miles above its pedagogic function. Most of the pieces are only a couple of minutes long but two last over double that. No. 38 in A minor is written ‘to bring the song together well with the accompaniment’ and is a gorgeous tune that could come straight out of Felix and Fanny’s Songs Without Words. No. 89 in A `at minor looks to work on the diffculty of sustaining tone and offers an essay in gentle Romantic melancholy within a tight classical structure: wonderful writing.

The recording, made just before Christmas 2021 by the BIS team using the Nimbus studio at Wyastone, in Monmouthshire, is beautifully clear without being claustrophobic. The real glory, though, is Hammond’s devotion to this music and her immaculate pianism. She is a pianist in a thousand and we can be grateful that there are 85 more Montgeroult études to record, quite apart from the rest of her work. It makes me believe too that Hammond may be maturing into a top rank interpreter of the early 19th century repertoire as well as the fearsome contemporary works with which she has been most associated up to now. More soon, please!