Women composers have hardly had their fair shakes. But I’d
venture to say that in Rochester, at least, their situation is looking up just
a bit this fall. Last month, a spectacular Pegasus Early Music concert featured
remarkable vocal music by the 17th century composer Barbara Strozzi;
in a couple of weeks the RPO will perform a recent percussion concerto by
Jennifer Higdon, one of the most popular contemporary American composers. And Sunday,
the Rochester Chamber Orchestra (under Music Director Gerard Floriano) performed a dandy, almost unknown symphony by a
female composer of the 19th century.
Louise Farrenc’s career is
unfortunately similar to that of many female musicians — outstandingly
talented, acclaimed in their lifetimes, but forgotten immediately afterwards. Farrenc, who was born in 1804 and died in 1874, was a
notable pianist and pedagogue who taught at the Paris Conservatoire for 30
years; she was also a composer whose early piano music was praised by Schumann.
(She and her husband also ran a successful music publishing company.) Besides
solo piano and chamber music, she also wrote three extremely attractive
symphonies, and Rochester heard the first of them on Sunday afternoon. (You can
discover a lot of Farrenc’s music, including those
symphonies, on YouTube.)
It may or may not be a masterpiece, but Farrenc’s
First Symphony is definitely worth rediscovering and rehearing. For a symphony
written in 1842 Paris, it is fairly conservative in style: a strict sonata-form
first movement, a lyrical slow movement, a minuet, and a passionate finale.
(And considering the 19th century Parisian mania for opera, it is somewhat unusual
that she wrote symphonies at all.) Farrenc’s style
can have a Beethovenian energy; the stern, passionate first movement, in C
minor, occasionally recalls the “Eroica.” But the
closest parallel among Farrenc’s contemporaries might
be Mendelssohn, with a touch of Berlioz in the fragrantly harmonized melodies
of the slow movement. This work also resembles the similarly classical-style
symphonies of Farrenc’s friend Saint-Saens, which
were a few years in the future. However, along with her solid symphonic
construction Farrenc offers nicely colored
orchestration, with beautiful and typically French use of the woodwinds and
horns, and her music has a personality of her own.
Floriano and the RCO presented this
rare piece splendidly and with such palpable enthusiasm that you’d think it had
been in the musicians’ repertoire for years. The tempos were well judged, and
the music practically leapt into the Hochstein Performance Hall. The audience
may have been disappointingly small, but at least a few people made a memorable
musical discovery on Sunday afternoon.
The program balanced the Farrenc
symphony with equally lively performances of two very familiar works: Mozart’s
“Marriage of Figaro” Overture and Beethoven’s First Symphony. Floriano led the Beethoven with a sophisticated, and quite
satisfying, combination of energy and relaxation; the small number of strings
allowed the composer’s elaborate writing for the winds and brass to sound out
clearly – and the conductor had a classically correct setup by dividing first
and second violins on either side of the podium, as Beethoven (and most
European composers up to the 20th century) would have known.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2016.
