Quartet: How Four Women Changed The Musical World - 'Magnificent' (Kate Mosse)

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She has written articles and programme notes for institutions including Glyndebourne, London Chamber Orchestra, Longborough Festival Opera, the Wigmore Hall, Oxford Lieder Festival, Birmingham Symphony Hall, and the Elgar Festival. The other two women are not involved in this particular musical event, although Broad tells us that 43-year-old Rebecca Clarke was giving a concert with the English Ensemble a few miles away, and seven-year-old Doreen Carwithen was practising the piano.

As Broad herself concludes, in an epilogue of sobering statistics about gender imbalance in classical music, there is a great deal more to say.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, creator of the century’s most war-torn soundscapes, appears as the purveyor of “gentle lyricism”. Born in the 1920s in Buckinghamshire, she had a musical mother, so studied piano and violin from the age of four.

I hope you, dear reader, may take the charitable view that repetition could make the passage in question easier to remember. Quartet has been reviewed in the Guardian, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Times, ​ The Spectatorand The SpectatorWorld, The New Statesman, Caught by the River, VANMagazineand Country Life.I’m working particularly on four composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen.

Pauline Viardot is “a famous contralto” for whom Gounod wrote “Sapho,” with no mention of her own operas. Part of the reason may be that, with the partial exception of Clarke, they refused to conform to the prevailing modernist aesthetic of the 20th century. however fascinating their lives and careers, and however much their music deserves to be more widely heard.You almost feel sorry for the group, until the subtext—that the Prix de Rome competition was well over 100 years old before it had its first female winner—smacks you in the face. In addition to their public concerts, the ensemble visits Solace Women’s Aid’s refuges and give concerts there. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs.