Louise Farrenc was born in 1804, just a few years before Schumann and Mendelssohn, and her music inhabits the same early Romantic world as theirs, with its roots particularly in Beethoven and sometimes indebted also to Weber. Farrenc lived and studied in Paris, where her piano teachers included Hummel and Moscheles; she went on to have a successful career as a pianist, and became a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire – the institution’s only female professor in the whole of the 19th century – but at that time women were unable to study composition there, and so from the age of 15 she took lessons privately with Anton Reicha.
Musical life in Paris in the 1830s and 40s was dominated by opera. Symphonic concerts were rare, not only because the symphony itself was still viewed very much as a German genre, but also because orchestras were few and far between in the capital. So Farrenc composed mostly piano and chamber pieces – the 1849 Nonet, for wind quintet and string quartet, is probably her best known work. Apart from two sets of variations for piano and orchestra and an unfinished piano concerto, all of her orchestral music, three symphonies composed between 1842 and 1847, and two overtures from 1834, is brought together on these discs from Laurence Equilbey and her period-instrument orchestra, Insula.
Those five works are more than enough to fix Farrenc’s position as a distinctive and significant voice in 19th-century French music. Her orchestral writing may not be as quirky and wildly imaginative as that of her contemporary Berlioz, who was a great admirer of her music, but at its best in the symphonies it easily stands comparison with the equivalent works by Schumann and Mendelssohn. The Third Symphony, first performed at a Conservatoire concert in 1849, is unquestionably the finest work here; as Equilbey shows, it’s a work of tremendous energy and verve, with stylistic links to Farrenc’s German counterparts certainly, but also with a flavour that’s distinctly its own. Despite a few rough edges, the Insula performances of all the pieces here demonstrate vividly how much they believe in the quality of this music too.
This week’s other pick
Also from Erato comes the latest of John Nelson’s Berlioz recordings with the Strasbourg Philharmonic, devoted to the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette. The series began spectacularly six years ago with a superb account of the opera Les Troyens but has never quite reached the same heights since, and this Roméo et Juliette is too often routine; the soloists, Joyce DiDonato, Cyrille Dubois and Christopher Maltman are first-rate, but the Strasbourg orchestra sounds distinctly subfusc when compared with those on a number of other versions, even though DiDonato fans will want to hear her performance of the scène lyrique Cléopâtre, which is included in the set too.
