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Saturday, December 10, 2016

Clara Schumann; Germaine Tailleferre - Piano Concerto; Harp Concerto (JoAnn Falletta)


Information

Composer: Fanny Mendelssohn; Clara Schumann; Germaine Tailleferre; Lili Boulanger
  1. F. Mendelssohn - Overture
  2. C. Schumann - Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7: I. Allegro maestro
  3. C. Schumann - Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7: II. Romanze
  4. C. Schumann - Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7: III. Finale
  5. Tailleferre - Concertino for harp & orchestra: I. Allegretto
  6. Tailleferre - Concertino for harp & orchestra: II. Lento
  7. Tailleferre - Concertino for harp & orchestra: III. Rondo
  8. Boulanger - D'un soir triste (arr. Falletta)
  9. Boulanger - D'un matin de printemps (arr. Falletta)

Angela Cheng, piano (2-4)
Gillian Benet, harp (5-7)
Women's Philharmonic Orchestra
JoAnn Falletta, conductor

Date: 1992
Label: Koch Schwann


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Review

As the heading reveals, the San Francisco-based Women's Philharmonic Orchestra recently won an award enabling them to record a two-volume anthology of works by female composers. The first went to five from the eighteenth century, when it really was unladylike for ladies to compose. Even a century later Mendelssohn's gifted sister, Fanny, found her creative aspirations severely confined. We're told that her Overture (1830), specially reconstructed from the manuscript to open this Volume 2, was just one of several hundred works left to languish in silence after their 'premieres' at the Sunday morning music parties held in the respectable privacy of the family home. The young Beethoven could well have been her model here. The only trouble is that the bigdenouement for which she so deftly prepares us in fact never arrives. As an infant prodigy, Clara Wieck (Schumann) was in a way luckier: music before marriage was her father's decree. She was a mere 16 when giving the 1835 Leipzig premiere of her A minor Piano Concerto (under Mendelssohn's baton), a work which ''needed weeding'', as Sterndale Bennett once observed, yet which so well deserves its twentieth-century resurrection for its gallant response to the new, romantic Davidsbund challenge of her youthful hero and husband-to-be, her Robert, who incidentally helped with its orchestration.

By 1928, when the 36-year-old Germaine Tailleferre wrote her harpConcertino, the female cause was already won—or at least in her native France. She took her place alongside the five males of Les Six by natural right of craftsmanship, reaffirming her allegiance to their racy wit, after passing glances at Ravel, in the work's finale. But for me the anthology is crowned by the last two pieces composed by Lili Boulanger in 1918 only just before she died, still only 25. Even though substantially edited both by Nadia Boulanger and the staff of the Women's Philharmonic, the longer darkly introspective D'un soir triste leaves no doubt as to what might have come from so searching a spirit. The all-female performers, conductor, soloists and orchestra alike, live up to their considerable reputations and the recording does them justice. Incidentally, only Clara's Piano Concerto is otherwise obtainable on disc.

-- Joan Chissell, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Womens-Philharmonic-Mendelssohn-Tailleferre/dp/B000001SFS

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Clara Schumann (née Clara Josephine Wieck; 13 September 1819 – 20 May 1896) was a German musician and composer, considered one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era. She exerted her influence over a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital and the tastes of the listening public. Her husband was the composer Robert Schumann, and ogether they encouraged Johannes Brahms. She was the first to perform publicly any work by Brahms and later premiered some other pieces by him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Schumann

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Germaine Tailleferre (19 April 1892 – 7 November 1983) was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six. Tailleferre's commitment to progressive musical ideas during the early 1920s earned her a measure of notoriety throughout the Parisian musical establishment. She left behind, at her death in 1983 at the age of 91, an extensive body of work representing almost 70 years of active composition.

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JoAnn Falletta (born February 27, 1954 in New York) is an American classical musician and orchestral conductor best known as music directors of the Virginia Symphony (since 1991) and Buffalo Philharmonic orchestras (since 1999). She has also served as music director of the Long Beach Symphony and of the Women's Philharmonic Orchestra (San Francisco). Falletta has recorded over 70 albums. In 2011 she was appointed artistic director of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra. Outside of the USA, Falletta was the 12th principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra (2011-2014).

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