This record started as homework. Susan Tomes was writing a book on female pianists across history when she kept finding the same uncomfortable fact: the women she was researching also wrote music, and almost none of it was being played. 'Women and the Piano' is the direct result — a compilation shaped by a scholar's curiosity and a performer's judgment, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. The scope is genuinely broad. Marianne Martines received lessons from Haydn, who was living with her family in lieu of rent, and her A major sonata has the exact bright-eyed sparkle you'd expect from that education — miniature, clean, Scarlatti-adjacent. Marianna von Auenbrugger died at 23, but her E-flat major sonata, published at Salieri's expense, is already doing things with harmonic color that her near-contemporary Mozart would not have found embarrassing. These are not curiosities. They are pieces that didn't survive because they weren't good enough. The more familiar names — Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, Cécile Chaminade — sit alongside genuine surprises. Maria Agata Szymanowska, Polish virtuoso and St. Petersburg neighbor of John Field, wrote a 'Caprice sur la Romance de Joconde' she dedicated to Field, and it shows: the nocturne influence is unmistakable. Teresa Carreño, Venezuelan-born and astonishing by any measure, played for Abraham Lincoln and wrote 'Un Bal en Rêve,' which, as Tomes notes, appears to quote something very close to 'Happy Birthday' a full quarter-century before that melody was published. Raie Da Costa's 'Razor Blades' lands in pure Billy Mayerl territory — syncopated, witty, alive. Tomes plays all of this with what the review describes as 'poetic instincts,' and that phrase is doing real work. She is not treating these pieces as historical artifacts requiring special handling. She plays them like music she believes in, which is the only approach that could have made this work. Hyperion's recording is natural and unobtrusive — the kind of production that trusts the instrument. The honest limit of the record is also its premise: every piece here is, by the circumstances of its creation, short and domestic in scale. The salon was the only room available. That context is part of what makes the compilation valuable as a historical document, but it also means the music never quite builds to the ambition you sense in the better moments. What you hear is what survived the bottleneck, not the full range of what might have been written given different conditions. That is not a flaw in Tomes' execution — it is the argument the record is making.
