An American original - the fascinating Mrs Beach

Dr & Mrs H.H.A Beach

On Sunday 23 April 2023, the Fidelio Trio - Darragh Morgan (violin), Tim Gill (cello), Mary Dullea (piano) - are performing Beethoven's Ghost Trio, Amy Beach's Trio in A minor and Ravel's Trio in A minor at Conway Hall. Before the concert I will be giving a pre-concert talk, at 5.30pm, introducing Beach and giving background to her music.

Still known mainly for her songs, Amy Beach (1867-1938) was in many ways a remarkable figure. Destined by her family to be a nicely brought up lady pianist, married at the age of 18 to a man older than her father, she studied piano with a pupil of Liszt, yet re-invented herself as a composer. 

A real auto-didact, she became the first successful American composer of large-scale art music and was one of the first American composers in the Western classical tradition to succeed without formal training in Europe, and in fact, she had little formal training in composition at all.

Find out more at my pre-concert talk, full details from the Conway Hall