Recently re-discovered composer Helen C. Crane (1868-1930) makes her 21st century debut with this collection of her piano works. A talented student of music, Ms. Crane was chosen to study composition in the 1890s with Philipp Scharwenka, pianist, composer and then director of the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory in Berlin, Germany. Here she studied alongside later notables like Otto Klemperer who was one of her contemporaries. With the completion of studies her budding career was met with numerous accolades and acceptance into the various German & Austrian publishing houses: among these Breitkopf & Hertel, Gustav Vetter, and Ries & Erler. On one of her trips home to the States (April of 1900) she premiered several of her pieces at Mendellsohn Hall in NYC and herself conducted an American premier of her orchestral tone-poem "The Last Tournament", based upon the same named chapter of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Idylls Of The King" Her career was marked with well-met premiers in Germany and Austria and she was honored to have her music performed by the Berlin Philharmonic at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. Her career appeared quite vibrant until the First World War brought it all to a close. She returned to the United States in 1917 where in spite of the horrific turn of events she once again was the recipient of an award: this time American. Federated Music Clubs awarded her first prize for her composition "Elegy for Cello". In the last decade of her life (1923) indicative of her success and her abiding appreciation to German-Austrian audiences, she was gifted an "all-Helen Crane" concert at the Mozarteum in Salzberg, with Dr. Bernhard Paumgartner conducting. She passed in November of 1930 at her home in Scarsdale, NY. She accomplished a great deal in her four-decade career, her music encompassing 74 numbered works: music for piano, violin, cello, string quartets, tone-poems for orchestra, art songs, works for choir as well as for orchestra and chorus and two symphonies. Her piano music gives a unique insight into her marvelous talent and reveals a heretofore unheard American strain: the unique marriage of Helen Crane's American taste and sensibilities and her German conservatory training. It is apparent upon playing and/or listening to her music that here was fertile ground for the blossoming of all manner of future American music styles, from music for the cinema to jazz.
