Photograph: Chronicle/Alamy
Cécile Chaminade is no longer a household name, or even a recognisable name, even in a time when female composers are being rediscovered and celebrated. I’ve loved her since I was a little boy visiting Hoylake for piano lessons with Heather Slade-Lipkin – her mother used to play Chaminade for me. It seems extraordinary now, but every time Joan would sit down at the piano for this opened-eyed little boy, devouring music like I was in a sweet shop, it was Chaminade’s Automne, or her Scarf Dance, or the tricky Toccata. One treat after another.
I’m playing a lot of Chaminade this season; or, more accurately, I’m playing a few pieces of hers many times – alongside three of the great, 30-minute masterpieces of 19th-century piano music: the Schumann Fantasie, and the B minor Sonatas of Liszt and Chopin. To those surprised by the juxtaposition, I think Chaminade sits very comfortably and proudly there, not because her elegant miniatures are comparable in scope and ambition to those three greatest keyboard works of the 19th century by three geniuses, but because she shared an important place with them in the most popular performance venue of the Romantic era: the salon.
