Radio Three's current Composer of this Week is at least a change from the recycled former CotWs padding out the weeks between the detailed celebration of Beethoven, I thought. So maybe it is just an attempt to rescue a composer from obscurity just because she is a woman. Sure enough, the first movement of her first piano concerto played today is run-of-the-mill Austro-German grandiloquence of a kind later guyed by Dohnányi. (The closing movement is similar.) However, the slow middle movement made me sit up. Original, slightly quirky, it seemed to point the way forward to Ravel. I normally object to "bleeding chunks" of concertos and symphonies being broadcast as is the custom now on Radio Three, but I would make an exception in this case.
Marie Jaëll is clearly worth investigating further.
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