Jean Françaix realised the "making pleasure" which was the French music supreme purpose for Debussy. Françaix's works are typically French: they have charm and spirit, yet often irony, too. His style resides in his sense of humour, his big literary culture, and his relationship with occidental musical tradition. Asked about his own music, Françaix wrote: "I was told that my works were easy. Those who say that have probably never played my works themselves. My works are not considered contemporary music, but I am not dead yet." Françaix wrote his Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano in 1990 in celebration of the 300th birthday of the clarinet and based it's instrumentation on Mozart’s classic Kegelstatt Trio. Watch a performance of  Jean Françaix's Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano (1990) played by Julie DeRoche (clarinet), Rami Solomonow (viola), and Aglika Angelova (piano)  . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Ruth Schönthal was an American composer and pianist of German birth whose eclectic music brought together elements as diverse as European Romanticism, Mexican folk song and Minimalism. Schönthal began her musical studies at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin when she was 5. In 1935, she was expelled, along with other Jewish students, at the insistence of the Nazis, and in 1938 she emigrated with her family to Sweden, where she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. In 1941, the family fled Stockholm; unable to obtain a visa for the United States, they went to Mexico City. In Mexico, Schönthal studied composition with Rodolfo Halffter and Manuel Ponce, and in 1946 she gave the premiere of her Concerto Romantico for Piano and Orchestra. Composer Paul Hindemith, who was in the audience, invited her to study with him at Yale. She graduated from Yale in 1948, and at first earned a living by writing advertising jingles and popular songs. But she also performed as a concert pianist and was highly regarded for her improvisatory skills. And she composed prolifically, often drawn to social, historical and religious themes. Her music found an audience in Germany, and in 1994 she was awarded the Heidelberg International Composition Prize for Women Composers. The same year, a biography, Ruth Schonthal: A Composer’s Musical Development in Exile, by Martina Helmig, was published in Germany, and later in an English translation. Listen to Ruth Schönthal talk about her work A Bird Over Jerusalem . . . it's our COMPOSER PORTRAIT for the week.

Composer Judith Zaimont writes about her Virgie Rainey - Two Narratives (2002): "While my earliest music is for the voice, in recent years I have not written quite so much for this medium, so the invitation to set Eudora Welty's words was especially enticing. Virgie Rainey portrays an independent, willful young woman, limned in reflection by her response to two emotional pivot points, one deeply saddening and the other rather frivolous. In Narrative One Virgie learns of the death of someone close to her and then proceeds, as if in a trance, down to the river to immerse herself (in quasi-baptismal sorrow). The tale is told in fragments of interrupted chant, mirroring Virgie's unconscious yet urgent journey by gradual and inexorable shifts to ever-faster tempi. Narrative Two is a delicious comic tale of Virgie's love-hate relationship with the piano - imagined in the opening phrase of Für Elise: the only music she ever played well - and her battle of wills with her piano teacher. Naturally, Beethoven distortions abound, set within a 'mock-opera' ambience." Listen to Narrative One from Judith Zaimont's  Virgie Rainey - Two Narratives  performed by soprano Wendy Zaro-Mullins, mezzo-soprano Jean del Santo, and pianist Timothy Lovelace. . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFUL for the week.