Linda Kouvaras: Pno Music Chamber Works & Songs [CD], Antoinette Halloran, CD

The Australian Linda Kouvaras (b. 1960) - pianist and musicologist as well as composer - adopts an explicitly feminist viewpoint in her work. She describes She, Who Should Have Been a Queen as a song-cycle, but in fact the text, by Antoinette Halloran, presents a series of dramatic scenas that radically re-assess the fates of a series of female characters from famous operas, the edgy humour and familiar musical language only slightly softening the implied social commentary. To the Lighthouse for brass quintet has, improbably, both a feminist subtext and the engaging buoyancy of a Baroque canzona. As with many other Australian composers, Kouvaras' piano music has a strong sense of space and place, and her expansive Bundanon Suite uses virtuosic piano-writing to present a series of sketches of the landscapes around the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales, with lyrical, elegiac melodic lines that soar over freewheeling piano textures.