Louise Farrenc: Symphonies Nos 1 & 3

Album review

The time has come at last to rescue the history of music from the male condescension that has relegated female composers to the status of a handful of oddities. Heir to Beethoven, revered in Paris through the teaching of her foreign teachers Hummel and Reicha, Louise Farrenc left behind her a collection of strong and dramatic symphonic works. Unlike Clara Schumann or Alma Mahler, Louise Farrenc was not hindered by a husband who set her to cooking, cleaning or bearing many children. Coming from an artistic background and strongly encouraged by her husband, she had every opportunity to develop as a composer, but also as a pianist, teacher, editor and musicologist.

This album is the first volume of Louise Farrenc's complete set of three Symphonies conducted by Laurence Equilbey at the head of the Insula Orchestra, which she assembled in order to explore little-known repertoire, in particular to bring to the forth works by the great forgotten composers such as Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn or Clara Schumann.

Despite the success she was beginning to enjoy in Paris, Louise Farrenc found it very difficult to stage her symphonic works in the French capital. It was in Brussels that her Symphony No. 1 in C minor was first performed. Its writing follows brilliantly in the wake of the best of the 1840s, in a style where craftsmanship competes with the influences of the great masters of the time: Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn.

Premiered this time around in Paris under the direction of François-Antoine Habeneck, whose interpretations of Beethoven's symphonies are known throughout Europe, the more personally written Symphony No. 3 in G minor begins with a cantilena for solo oboe preceding an Allegro full of dramatic energy, syncopations and harmonic surprises.

In her symphonies, Louise Farrenc has managed to combine contemporary Viennese style with great intensity and originality. Far from being mere curiosities, Farrenc's symphonies deserve to be included in the repertoire of French orchestras, like those of Albéric Magnard, which are also forgotten in his own country, but that's another story... © François Hudry/Qobuz

Details of original recording : Recorded: 4–6 March 2021, Auditorium Patrick Devedjian – La Seine Musicale, Boulogne-Billancourt (France)