Samantha Ege

‘Bold, brilliant, and daring women’ nourish Samantha Ege’s recital of 20th and 21st century piano music, including a work by Havanan ‘fusionista’ Camila Cortina Bello. Pianist, musicologist, and serial champion of the under-represented, Samantha Ege has a special affinity with Florence Price, whose highly charged Sonata launches a recital that also nudges the dial towards Cuba with works by Odaline de la Martinez and Camila Cortina Bello. Mexico yields an irresistibly fidgety study by Gabriela Ortiz, and East meets West in Chen Yi’s variations on a Chinese folk song. Samantha Ege’s Barbican debut in 2021 was hailed by iNews as ‘vivid, revelatory’, and that same year she gave the premiere of Florence Price’s complete Fantasie Nègre at the London Festival of American Music. Price is something of a calling card for Ege whose recording of the Fantasie moved the New York Times to observe ‘Triumphs indeed… a testament to how Ege has brought this music to the life it more than deserves’.