ANNALENA MCAFEE, ​Financial Times There's nothing shouty about Quartet, the musicologist Leah Broad's compelling group biography... The tone is restrained, but the quietly insistent patter of events, statistics, quotations and facts adds up by the end to a polemical roar. BBC Proms Talks, Aug. 2018 & 2019 (Broadcast pre-concert talks on works by Outi Tarkiainin, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, and Sibelius)

And then I heard an opening theme that was so arresting that I had to stop and listen. The viola swoops and soars, confident and powerful, conjuring up a fantastical world that seems to make everything else dull by comparison. It felt like this music was speaking directly to me, personally. I was so engrossed that I nearly missed my appointment.Quartet adds to what we knew of Smyth, and provides the first detailed biographies of its other subjects. But it is a book of reactionary taste that sets up a false opposition between its crude conceptions of modernism (“dissonant, jarring”) and non-modernism (“memorable, singable”). The latter is the chief musical territory of Quartet and clearly Broad’s comfort zone. So her wider aim, of making “an unapologetic case for the importance of women in music history”, is weakened by the fact that her subjects are never shown in a larger context attentive or sympathetic to those women who did embrace the musical avant garde. What she deems the “aggressive styles” of Elisabeth Lutyens or Elizabeth Maconchy are given brief cameos; radical innovators such as Priaulx Rainier, Ruth Crawford Seeger and many others are totally absent. As Broad herself concludes, in an epilogue of sobering statistics about gender imbalance in classical music, there is a great deal more to say.

The subtitle of Quartet, historian Leah Broad’s book about four UK women composers, reads boldly: How Four Women Changed the Musical World. Leah was selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, so is frequently on the BBC discussing her research. As a public speaker, she has appeared at events including the BBC Proms, Elgar Festival, Oxford Lieder Festival, Southbank Festival, Being Human Festival, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Free Thinking Festival, and Hay Festival. Broad paints vivid, at times over-imagined, pictures of all four women and the worlds in which they lived and worked. She deftly interweaves their stories in a chronological tapestry, although she opens the book in 1930 with Ethel Smyth, then in her seventies, conducting the Metropolitan Police Band in musical works including a piece by the then 32-year-old Dorothy Howell.Cant [sic] think how Ethel ever liked me,” wrote Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth’s last great love, “such a new moon slip of a life, compared with her full orange harvest glow.” FLORA WILLSON , The Times Literary Supplement I defy any reader of Broad's splendid, necessary and absorbing book to remain unstirred by these uplifting , harrowing and troubling stories. For me, Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata is one of those pieces. I was having a miserable day and was sat in an optician’s waiting room with a migraine. I’d put on a podcast to try to distract myself from the world wavering disconcertingly around me, but I wasn’t really paying attention to it. Here's a coincidence: On the day that a copy of the new Robert Macfarlane book arrived at the office, I...