Esther Abrami: Women

The Strad Issue: June 2025

Description: A triumph of slickness over substance from a social media star

Musicians: Esther Abrami (violin) Kim Barbier (piano) Lavinia Meijer (harp) Esther Abrami Quintet, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra/Irene Delgado-Jiménez

Works: Music by Abrami, Boyle, Carreño, Cyrus, Dudley, Gonzaga, Hildegard, Portman, Shimomura, Smyth, Strohl, Viardot-Garcia and Weber

Catalogue number: SONY CLASSICAL 19802900182

Violinist and social media influencer Esther Abrami’s Women showcases 14 female composers from the 19th century up to the present day, many in new arrangements, including by Abrami herself.

Her arrangement of Ethel Smyth’s suffragette hymn, March of the Women, opens the programme, worked into a piece for violin and orchestra into which has been sampled an impassioned speech by Emmeline Pankhurst, recorded in 1906. Onwards, and there’s Yoko Shimomura’s Valse di Fantastica for the video game Final Fantasy XV. There is also the much-loved song Hai Luli! by Pauline Viardot-Garcia – ‘basically the influencer of the 19th century’ – in a new arrangement for violin, harp and string quintet by Jan-Peter Klöpfel, and the world premiere of 20th-century Irish composer Ina Boyle’s Violin Concerto – a short, late-Romantic pastoral work carrying a slight flavour of Vaughan Williams (with whom Boyle took a few lessons), but lacking the energy and tighter architecture of his slightly later female pupil, Ruth Gipps.

It’s all very sincerely but also slickly performed and presented. It also all sounds very produced, and significantly more single-flavoured in all regards than such a span of periods, genres and instrumental constellations had the potential to be. One for Abrami’s social media fans, and for teenage newcomers to classical.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER