[Culture] Cécile: A One-Woman Show (SUN)

CÉCILE: A ONE-WOMAN SHOW

"The most famous composer you've never heard of"

with Karin Lechner by Peter Gumbel

90-minute show with intermission

Cécile Chaminade is the most famous French female composer you’ve never heard of. A hugely popular composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she was discovered by Bizet when she was just 12; “you cannot keep her genius down”, Bizet told her father. Chaminade’s piano music and pieces sold in the thousands. She played to packed houses all over Europe and America. Queen Victoria invited her to Windsor Castle several times and, during Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidency, she played at the White House as a stop on her triumphant tour of the United States. Chaminade was the first female composer to make a gramophone recording (1901) and the first French female composer to be awarded the Légion d'Honneur. Then, after the First World War, she disappeared from public view, just as her music disappeared from the classical repertoire.

In Cécile, a show written by Peter Gumbel, Karin Lechner recounts Chaminade’s moving life story, and, in her virtuoso style, plays the composer’s greatest hits. Cécile Chaminade was very prolific, composing more than 400 pieces in all, half of them for piano. She became a role model in her lifetime; on her 1908 tour of the United States, she visited one of the more than 200 “Chaminade Clubs” that had sprung up, where women would meet to make music together. Yet, despite her popularity with the public, she struggled to gain the respect of the (mostly male) critics, who often disparaged her work as “trivial”.

At a time when other long-overlooked 19^th-century female composers such as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn are enjoying a revival, the story of Cécile Chaminade will resonate not just with classical music lovers but also with a younger generation eager to right history by restoring an artist to her earned place in the cultural canon.

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ABOUT

Karin Lechner is an accomplished concert pianist and actress. Born in to a highly musical family in Argentina, she began her musical training at the age of 4. She made her orchestral debut at the age of 11. Martha Argerich, Nelson Freire, Daniel Barenboim, Nikita Magaloff, and Rafael Orozco have all guided her on her musical journey. She has played in venues including the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Suntory Hall in Tokyo, and the Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires. Her acting career also started at a young age: she starred in a popular children’s show broadcast throughout Latin America. After her family moved to London, she studied theatre at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and later continued with Benoît Blampain in Brussels.

Peter Gumbel is a writer and passionate music lover. He is an award-winning journalist and author of five books. He started his career as an international correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, and went on to work for Time and Fortune. He is working on a novel about the life in exile of composers and other artists, including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Alma Mahler-Werfel, who fled wartime Europe to seek refuge in Los Angeles. He is fascinated by the question of what makes the work and reputations of some artists endure, and is committed to reviving the work of those (especially female composers) who have fallen into oblivion.