Helen Hopekirk gave the first American performances of her Concertstück for Piano and Orchestra in D Minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Wilhelm Gericke on 15-16 April 1904.  The work was next heard in the United States on 17 April 2015, when pianist Gary Steigerwalt joined conductor Ng Tian Hui and the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra for a performance in Abbey Memorial Chapel on the Mount Holyoke College campus.  The concert was generously supported by a grant from The Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy. 

Performers in the 2015 concert used the performance edition constructed by Dana Muller as part of her doctoral dissertation in 1995, from holograph scores and parts preserved in the Helen Hopekirk Collection of the Music Division of the Library of Congress. 

Click here to hear a recording of the performance.

About the Work

“It will be noticed that the Concertstück is moulded pretty much on classical lines at its opening, but as it develops there is a characteristic freedom of form, and what may be called fantastic flavor, redolent of northern breezes and heathery hills, which become more and more conspicuous.”

Excerpt from program notes by James Caxton Dibdin
for the premiere of the Concertstück, 1894

Hopekirk wrote her Concertstück in Paris between October 1893 and April 1894 and first performed it with the Scottish Orchestra under Georg Henschel in Edinburgh and Dundee the following November.  In earlier years she had performed single-movement “concert pieces” for piano and orchestra by Carl Maria von Weber and Carl Reinecke, works structured as a succession of discrete short movements separated by pauses.  Rejecting this model for her own Concertstück, Hopekirk assembled, as described by Dibdin, an unusual continuous five-part structure for the work: 

            First Cadenza / Exposition / Development / Second Cadenza / Finale

Opening the Concertstück with the First Cadenza, to be played Maestoso (majestically), Hopekirk firmly establishes the dominance of the soloist and introduces three brief melodic subjects.  The subjects contain a variety of melodic and harmonic materials, including Aeolian modes, chromatic scales, and harmonic root shifts by tritones.  Frequently encountered in British and Western European folk music, the Aeolian mode (or, in current terminology, natural minor scale) contrasts with the more common harmonic minor scale by not raising the seventh degree of the scale by a half step.  Hopekirk uses this “lowered seventh” of the Aeolian mode (e.g., in the key of D minor, a C natural instead of a C sharp) to darken the harmonic colors of her Concertstück.

The Exposition and Development sections adhere closely to conventional sonata-allegro structure.  The Exposition introduces Primary and Secondary Themes in D minor and F major, respectively.  Labeled “wild and barbaric” by Dibdin, the Primary Theme emphasizes scale degrees of an ancient pentatonic scale, while the Secondary Theme (“a plaintive love song”) settles into the more familiar major mode.  The Development section opens with a variant of the Primary Theme, followed by obsessive repetitions of the First Subject from the opening cadenza. 

The Second Cadenza, the most innovative portion of the work, is an improvisation on all five subjects and themes.  After a brief recitative-like passage that mirrors passages from the first-movement cadenza of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, a solo oboe suddenly “lingers over [the Primary and Secondary Themes] with dreamy tenderness, while the piano supplies a background of soft, harp-like harmonies.”

 In the Presto Finale, the 4/4 meter of the First and Second Subjects is converted to 6/8, transforming the subjects into a wild jig between soloist and orchestra.  The work ends with fiery chromatic scales in interlocking octaves over much of the keyboard. 

 Reception of the Concertstück

 In the late Victorian era, women were encouraged to play the piano or to sing skillfully, but without pretension, as an accomplishment that would increase their prospects for marriage.  Perceived as lacking the reasoning skills necessary to compose in large structures, female composers were expected to write only short songs and piano pieces – i.e., music suitable for the home and soothing to their hard-working husbands.  By producing a twenty-minute work of interconnected sections for piano and orchestra, Hopekirk dared to surpass these sedate boundaries.

A journalist once asked Hopekirk if the fact of her being a woman ever interfered with the recognition of her work.  Hopekirk admitted that “sometimes a certain reluctance was apparent on the part of musicians to examine [my] compositions because they were a woman’s work, and when [my] violin sonata was performed in Boston the critics . . . dissected it with unnecessary elaboration, dwelling on details which in the case of a man’s work would never have been discussed at all.”

Male music journalists assessed the Concertstück at a lower standard than that applied to compositions by Hopekirk’s male counterparts. The Dundee Advertiser acknowledged that it was probably the first large-scale work “ever attempted by a Scottish lady;” therefore it was “one of those works not amenable to the explanations of music annotators.” The Boston Transcript remarked, in gendered language, that the work “lacked unity of design” and “was the entertaining but disjointed conversation at a tea-party.”

 Female journalists were more willing to praise Hopekirk’s achievement.  The Lady Correspondent for the Dundee Advertiser claimed in feminist terms, “A woman composer playing her own studies, and hearing her fancies crystallised into sound at the hands of a superb orchestra, is not an everyday occurrence, even in this the Woman’s Century, and I felt that the whole sex was complimented in the applause which rewarded Madame Hopekirk’s effort.”  Following the Boston premiere, fellow composer Amy Beach wrote approvingly to Hopekirk:  “You gave us a work of remarkable beauty in its themes and their harmonic background, and of solid worth in their development.  It is well-proportioned, varied and thoroughly musicianly from beginning to end, and proved so interesting that I long to hear it again!  The cadenza is especially lovely, (with the oboe solo) and your beautiful harmonization of the first theme most captivating.”

 Seen in the context of Hopekirk’s entire output, the compositional style of the Concertstück reflects three disparate influences found in much of her music from the mid-1890’s:  virtuosic elements from the concertos she had performed during fifteen arduous years of concertizing; lyrical and harmonic aspects of the German Romanticism she had grown to love during her years in Leipzig and Vienna; and the flavors of the ancient Scottish folk music of her native country that would pervade all of her compositions and frame her identity as a composer in future years.

Gary Steigerwalt and Dana Muller