The Scottish musician Helen Hopekirk (1856–1945) was regarded as one of the major concert pianists of her generation. She also made a lasting contribution as a piano teacher in Boston, Mass., after her emigration in 1897. As a composer, she forged an intriguing path by turning to the music of her native country as the wellspring of her creativity. The early pieces can sound like Brahms in the Highlands, and her later works marry Debussyan Impressionism with Hebridean folk-music, to evocative, touching and exhilarating effect. This is the first album dedicated to her music.

Gary Steigerwalt, who is writing a biography of Helen Hopekirk, recently retired as a professor on the music faculty of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where he taught for 35 years. He gave the first performance in over a century of her Concertstück with the Mount Holyoke College Symphony Orchestra in 2015. Earlier in his career Gary took Second Prize and an award for the best performance of a work by Béla Bartók at the Liszt-Bartók International Piano Competition and gave the NY premieres of Iain Hamilton’s Sonata no.3 in B and John McCabe’s Fantasy on a Theme of Liszt and the world premiere of the Concerto in E flat major by the novelist Anthony Burgess.