Playing Montgeroult
by Clare Hammond
I started to play Montgeroult’s Etudes as encores in September 2020. At first people thought her music was nice but were sometimes dismissive. It was only when I had worked on the Etudes for a while that I started to discover the subtleties of her music, and now people are really engaging with it.
Other performers are doing her music, but not enough to create a school or standard way of doing it, so you don’t have that kind of body to draw on. With composers we know well, we take for granted how much of the legwork has already been done – we know what the context is, so the music immediately means more to us.
I recorded on a Steinway in Wyastone Hall in Monmouth. Because of Covid-19, I couldn’t try out the music as much as I’d want on historical instruments, but I did have a clavichord on a long-term loan. Montgeroult wouldn’t have been writing for that, but because you can do very slight crescendos on notes on the clavichord, it gave me the opportunity to try out the melodies and shape them in a way that really helped. The singing tone is so crucial to Montgeroult’s music.