Idith Meshulam Korman and Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey on Marianna Martines

Martines, The Complete Keyboard Works was released by Signum Classics on 17th April, driven by the passion of pianist Idith Meshulam Korman, and conductor Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, to give voice to a composer of the Classical period whose music has disappeared into obscurity despite her having played duets with Mozart, become the first female to be admitted to the Academy de Bologna and having been celebrated by Charles Burney in his journals. 

I had the pleasure of speaking with Idith and Cayenna about their journey into Martines's world, and the making of this very special album. 

This is a fascinating album and I have to confess I hadn't come across Martines before, so you've won a convert already. What brought you to her music?

Idith: Well, like you, I'd never heard of Marianna Martines and when we started recording, Cayenna was smart enough to ask the Oxford Philharmonic, do any of you know the name Marianna Martines, and not even one hand was raised. So, we all never heard of her name, though she was so famous at her time and then totally disappeared.

I was involved in a fundraiser and played in a beautiful theatre piece called The Other Mozart, and the actress came to me and said, there's no other way that I can thank you other than to recommend you check Marianna Martines, and that's how it started. 

I fell in love with the G major sonata, and then when I looked at the concerti, I knew right away that she must be heard in a larger way. First, I contacted several male conductors and they all dismissed her as a second-rate composer, but luckily, I had the pleasure to get to know Cayenna and the project flew quite fast from then on. 

Cayenna, what made you excited about it, apart from Idith’s enthusiasm and coming into contact with the music?

Cayenna: I've been dedicated for a long time to supporting the work of women composers, whether those be contemporary or historical. Almost all my concerts either have a piece by a female composer or a new composition that addresses an issue.

When Idith came to me with this project I was really excited to think about how we could make it happen, so it was a natural fit for me. I'll admit a bit of trepidation; I don't ‘live’ in the eighteenth century; I sort of ‘live’ in the mid-nineteenth and on, and so there was that sort of personal expansion as well.

The idea that we'd play on a modern piano with modern instruments at 440 was a comfort zone for me, and I liked the idea of being able to demonstrate how robust this music is. Like any great music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it transcends instrumentation.

Perhaps, as we often say, Martines would have played on whatever keyboard instrument was available, whether it be a harpsichord, fortepiano, or had she lived to see one, a pianoforte...

Cayenna: What we do know from Idith’s own experience and that of Dr Judith Valerie Engel, a wonderful musicologist and pianist who worked with us on this project to share her knowledge of Martines, is that boy, it's hard stuff!

When you are working with modern actions that are so much heavier, it's a workout. So, yes, I think she would have enjoyed playing on the concert grands we have today, but she might have written differently for them. She was quite a technical gymnast, clearly by the writing that she has left us, and that fits well on the harpsichord, or the fortepiano, which would have been around - she would have played both for sure.

Did you work with a technician at all, Idith, in terms of setting up the action on the modern piano to suit the music? 

Idith: It was a huge challenge to play it on the piano, but the main problem that I faced was that Martines tends to write a lot of rapidly repeated notes. Normally as pianists, we change the fingers, but they are so fast that you can’t do that, so I almost had to develop a new technique because you must do it with the same finger, which is quite challenging. 

The other problem was there are many trills that couldn't be as light and as fast as on Martines’s own instrument. It's entirely different mechanics that we pianists, when we play on modern pianos, need to deal with.

This music is evidence isn’t it, of just how much skill Martines had at the keyboard, and how much further she could have gone had society been different.

Idith: She couldn't play publicly, so she had these salons that were, I think, on a weekly basis and then she played with Mozart, music for four hands. According to testimonies of people that witnessed these concerts, she was a stupendous pianist and an amazing singer.

Cayenna: I think one of the things that's so striking about Martines’s story is just that it really flags up how certain forms of professionalism are validated in the way that we receive musical history and other types of music making are not, and that's very largely one of the reasons why Martines didn't survive. There are other things that we could attribute it to in terms of general sexism and misogyny, but she didn't drive to publish even. It wasn't helpful to the family situation to do that or to her own, so she didn't, and even when she was admitted to the Academy de Bologna, this very prestigious award, the first female composer ever to be admitted, she didn't go to collect her award in person because it wasn't very appropriate for her to do. 

I think that's what I love, too, about this technical brilliance: She had this real tension within her of this huge subversion of norms; of being this extraordinary singer, pianist and virtuoso, and at the same time performing this ideal role as a sister, daughter, host…

For somebody who studied the basics with Haydn, and who Charles Burney described as groundbreaking in his diary, to end up disappearing out of knowledge, is almost incomprehensible.

Idith: Sadly, we lost most of her oeuvre because she wrote 31 piano sonatas and unfortunately only three remain, and I was just thinking, what would we know about Haydn had we only three of his sonatas? We really don't get the whole big picture of her composition ability and expression.

Cayenna: Same thing with the concertos. I don't know entirely what else has been lost. Her vocal works, I think, survive more, most likely I guess because they would have been performed outside of the home more, for example, like her masses and those sorts of things by choirs. I think the thing about her is she was so incredibly learned in her style, and I think a lot of what she wrote for was for her audience, so she's in dialogue with her audience as a musician and as a composer. It has that depth to it, the cleverness, which if you have those ears, you can enjoy, but also, you don't need to know anything just to enjoy the sound of it and to enjoy the textures and the melodies. Her second movements are out of this world. 

Idith: You can hear her instincts as a singer in the way she writes her phrases in those slow movements.

It’s wonderful that you’re giving life to this music.

Idith: I would just say that that is a real motivator for us. These works need to be recorded and they need to be recorded a lot. We will understand the fullness of Martines's music when collectively we've recorded, re-recorded, and performed it until we work out all the musical problems, and all the musical opportunities to hear it in different ways. That’s what this whole tradition of what I like to call historically European classical music is all about: We have this system of notation that we provide to a performer to then play from, and it has this beautiful space for realisation.