Catch a clip of this music on the radio and you are likely to run out and buy the disc. Who could be the composer of such stirring, red-blooded, high-romantic works? Are they recently discovered Rachmaninov? Or did Dvořák leave some wildly adventurous scores in a bottom drawer?
The answer is neither. Born in 1885, Dora Pejačević was the daughter of aristocratic Hungarian-Croatian parents and started composing in her teens. She was determined, widely travelled and moved in prestigious cultural circles, but her early death at the age of 37 cut off her work in its prime.
After decades of neglect Pejačević’s name came to notice again in 2021, when Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra presented a memorable performance of her Symphony at the Barbican, London. This recording was made about 10 days later at Fairfield Halls, Croydon, and the Symphony is paired with her earlier, hardly less rousing Piano Concerto.
A massively imposing opening suggests the Symphony will be a Gothic melodrama. Then the lyrical themes start to flow and Pejačević always seems to have another one up her sleeve. Although there are some bombastic passages, the cinematic sweep of the music and, above all, its super-romantic idiom are hard to resist.
The Piano Concerto, written in 1913 and her first work for orchestra, is understandably less sophisticated. The big moments do not hang together well, but Peter Donohoe revels in the panache of the solo part and the support from Oramo and the BBCSO is suitably wholehearted.
★★★★☆
‘Dora Pejacevic: Piano Concerto and Symphony’ is released by Chandos
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