Elgar & Beach: Piano Quintets

Amy Beach (1867–1944) came from the same generation that brought Edith Wharton and Willa Cather to the forefront in American arts. Her impact might have been as great as theirs had her career not been circumscribed by her marriage; even so, it was significant. The aiming points for Beach’s Piano Quintet in F Sharp Minor are Grieg, Dvorˇák, and, without a doubt, Brahms—all dead by the time the score was finished. But the idiom, with its heavy textures and evaporative harmony, is not that far removed from what Fauré and Schoenberg were doing at the same time in the sphere …