A native of the Republic of Estonia, Kruusmaa studied composition at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn and the Conservatorio di Musica di Giuseppe Verdi in Milan, Italy. In 2021 she won the Annual Prize of the Endowment for Music of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. In recent years the busy Tallinn resident has continued to expand her reach beyond her disproportionately composer-dense homeland, fulfilling commissions from orchestras, choirs and chamber ensembles throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. During the 2023/24 season she served as composer in residence at the Dutch National Opera and Ballet, in Amsterdam. The appointment was a natural fit for Kruusmaa, who enjoys writing for both the stage and the concert hall.

Despite her youth, Kruusmaa has earned recognition for her inventive and mesmerizing style, resulting in several international awards and prizes. Her composition Rain (2018) for mezzo-soprano and orchestra won the best composition prize at the 24th Young Composers Meeting in the Netherlands. She was twice featured (2018 and 2021) as a composer at the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition in Los Angeles. Last year she was awarded a fellowship by the charismatic and critically lauded Estonian conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, a champion of his fellow countrymen (and countrywomen), including Arvo Pärt, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Heino Eller, Veljo Tormis and now Kruusmaa.

A Closer Listen

Completed in 2021, Five Arabesques is a compact five-movement sequence for a chamber orchestra consisting solely of strings (specifically, 12 first violins, 10 second violins, eight violas, six cellos and four double-basses). Kruusmaa was inspired by the opening lines of “In Secret We Thirst,” by the German-Swiss poet, novelist, painter and mystic Hermann Hesse: “Graceful, spiritual, with the gentleness of arabesques. Our life is similar to the existence of fairies that spin in soft cadence around nothingness, to which we sacrifice the here and now.”

Every worthwhile composer, regardless of nationality or genre, is an accomplished syncretist, a creative magpie, a canon raider. Kruusmaa juggles the hummably tonal and the non-hummable noise-adjacent, but this delightful tendency isn’t what sets her apart from her peers. What makes her compositional voice exceptional is also what makes her original, an indescribable, irreducible quality that you’ll recognize right away without being able to pin it down. Slippery and luminous, Five Arabesques shifts from delicate dissolving pastels to blazing Technicolor, creating a trippy tapestry of sounds and textures that appeals to fans of Björk and Bach alike.

Just go ahead and turn off the analytical part of your brain—the exhausting, anxiety-generating, intellectual part—and surrender to the sensuous joy of listening. What better way to “sacrifice the here and now” than by giving yourself over to music, the only art form that exists in time and transcends it: an audible abstraction, math made magic. Either that, or it’s all just a spell cast by spinning fairies. Listen closely, and you might hear them gently ascending in the fourth movement, in twinkling pentatonic traces, before the final arabesque settles to the ground: a dying Tchaikovsky swan, a soft cadence around nothingness.

For the first half of her life, Beach did her best to accommodate the expectations and prejudices of her social class. Married female composers could be tolerated, even politely admired; married female performers provoked gossip and scorn. After her father died, in 1895, her mother moved in, creating drama on the domestic front and making her marriage more difficult. She began work on her first and only piano concerto in 1897, intending it as fresh fodder for what she hoped would be a successful career relaunch. She missed her former life as a celebrated virtuosa, but she had to leave it behind when she married, at 18, as her surgeon husband expected. (He restricted her to two public performances annually, with all proceeds going to charitable causes.) When the concerto received its premiere, in Boston, on April 7, 1900, she played the solo part herself. It was a success, leading to even more successful performances in Hamburg, Leipzig and Berlin. One German critic called her the first American woman “able to compose music of a European quality of excellence.”

Beach was a female genius in an age and culture that discouraged, diminished and demeaned the participation of women in the “serious” arts. In many ways, she wasn’t much better off than Mozart’s brilliant sister Nannerl, another female child prodigy who sacrificed her career when she married; nor was Beach as brave (or as driven, or desperate) as Clara Schumann, who supported her enormous family by going on grueling concert tours despite her famous (and famously needy) composer-husband’s complaints. Beach managed to chart her own path, one that accommodated her ambitions without making her a social pariah. But it wasn’t until her husband’s death, in 1910, followed by her mother’s death a year later, that she finally enjoyed the freedom to make all her own career decisions. She never gave up composing, but she preferred the adrenalized high of a live performance. “The joy of giving of your highest powers is beyond description,” she explained in a 1917 interview. “When I play, there is only limitless enthusiasm and enjoyment.”

From Child Prodigy to Society Wife

Born Amy Marcy Cheney, in Henniker, New Hampshire, Beach displayed her freakish gift for music early on. She reportedly sang as many as 40 songs by the ripe old age of one year. A year later she was improvising original melodies. Endowed with perfect absolute pitch, she could read music fluently by age three; a year later she was composing simple waltzes at the keyboard. She started giving public piano recitals at age seven, performing works by Beethoven, Chopin and herself. Rather than attend conservatory, as her teachers recommended, Beach followed her family’s wishes and received private piano lessons from Carl Baermann, a former student of Franz Liszt. At 14 she undertook a year of private study with Junius W. Hill, who provided the only formal instruction that she would ever receive in composition.

At 16, Beach debuted with an orchestra, launching a brief and fulfilling concertizing career before her marriage two years later, to the 42-year-old Beach, abruptly ended it. She focused on composing instead, publishing her work under the byline Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, as convention demanded.

Despite these concessions to propriety, her career was decidedly less conventional than that of the average New England society matron. Premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, her Gaelic Symphony was the first symphony by an American woman to be performed by an American orchestra. Her Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, completed three years later, is the first known piano concerto by an American female composer. Overall, she completed roughly 300 compositions in a variety of genres, primarily keyboard, chamber and choral music.

Beach once claimed that a musical composition can be a “veritable autobiography.” If this is true, her Piano Concerto describes the life of a composer, a creative artist who is proud enough of her own accomplishments to insert a few musical signatures: self-quotations from at least three early songs, allusions both overt and oblique. She doesn’t bother to identify or explain them in the program notes, likely because she didn’t expect her audience to be familiar with her back catalogue.
Quoting oneself is more or less mandatory for composers, but most of Beach’s other formal and stylistic moves are less predictable. Most obviously, the concerto comprises four movements instead of the typical three, and the first is a little longer than the next three combined. At times the piano and orchestra seem to be in opposition—perhaps a musical dramatization of the composer’s domestic frustrations. Reasons aside, the fluctuating tension between the solo instrument and the orchestra gives the concerto a dramatic arc and compounds the sense of conflict and urgency. The third and shortest movement, marked Largo, was inspired by her husband’s poem “Twilight,” which concludes with the following stanza:

[…] All sounds are stilled,
The birds have hushed themselves to rest
And night comes fast, to drop her pall
Till morn brings life to all.

The son of a piano tuner and music-shop owner, Elgar grew up Catholic and working class in Worcester, England. Although his formal training was spotty, he learned to play the violin, bassoon and organ and began composing at age 10. He became a freelance musician at 16, picking up orchestral and conducting gigs around Worcester and taking on the occasional violin pupil. In 1885, at 28, he succeeded his father as organist of St. George’s Church.

Four years later, he married Caroline Alice Roberts, the blue-blooded daughter of the late Major General Sir Henry Gee Roberts. A decade older than Elgar, Alice, as she preferred to be called, believed in her young husband’s genius and didn’t mind subsidizing it. Until 1899, when he finally found fame with Variations on an Original Theme (commonly known as the Enigma Variations), Elgar hustled in obscurity. Were it not for strong-willed, endlessly devoted Alice—who violated several social taboos when she married “below her station,” over the strenuous objections of her family—Elgar might not have had the leisure to compose.

A Closer Listen

The work that would finally make Elgar famous, at age 42, was a happy accident. After a long day teaching violin in Malvern, he liked to relax by improvising at the piano. Before long, he arrived at the tune he would later call “Enigma;” he knew he had his theme when Alice mentioned how much she liked it. He continued to entertain her by performing a series of variations inspired by their friends, beginning with Billy Baker (identified in the score as W.M.B.). Each variation is an attempt to channel a particular personality, to write in the distinctive styles that Elgar imagined his friends might employ were they “asses enough to compose.”

We now know the real-life counterparts for each of the 14 character sketches: from the composer’s wife (C.A.E.), to whom he whistled a special tune on arriving home each evening, to his great friend and champion Augustus Jaeger, here referred to as “Nimrod,” after the mighty hunter in the Bible, because his friend’s surname means “hunter” in German. Other variations are linked to colleagues, neighbors and students, each subject characterized by the composer’s memories and impressions: the sweet stutter of graceful Dora Penny (“Dorabella”); the études of his viola student Isabel (“Ysobel”); the antics of George Sinclair’s clumsy bulldog, Dan; and Lady Mary Lygon’s trip to Australia (listen for quotations from Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage).

For the finale he offers a self-portrait, labeled “E.D.U.” Alice’s nickname for him was “Edoo,” short for “Eduard,” an alternative spelling of “Edward.” Here he reprises themes from the “Nimrod” and “C.A.E.” variations, in honor of the “two great influences on the life and art of the composer,” as he wrote years later. It’s beautifully recursive: he describes them in music, then quotes from these musical descriptions to describe himself. He made them, maybe, but he’s also made of them.

Although Elgar eventually confirmed the identities of each musical portrait, the wistful G-minor “Enigma” theme is eternally enigmatic. Over the years, music scholars have proposed countless sources for this melody, ranging from “Rule Britannia” to Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony, but all they can do is guess. As Elgar explained, the theme’s “dark saying” will always be a secret: “I warn you that the connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’ but is not played…. So the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas… the chief character is never on the stage.”