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

Information

Composer: Fanny Mendelssohn; Clara Schumann; Germaine Tailleferre; Lili Boulanger

• F. Mendelssohn - Overture
• C. Schumann - Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7
• Tailleferre - Concertino for harp & orchestra
• Boulanger - D'un soir triste (arr. Falletta)
• Boulanger - D'un matin de printemps (arr. Falletta)

Angela Cheng, piano

Gillian Benet, harp

Women's Philharmonic Orchestra

JoAnn Falletta, conductor

Date: 1992

Label: Koch

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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 big denouement 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 harp Concertino, 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

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Clara Schumann (née Wieck; 13 September 1819 – 20 May 1896) was a German pianist, composer and teacher, wife of composer Robert Schumann. She studied piano from the age of five and by 1835 had established a reputation throughout Europe as a child prodigy. Though family responsibilities curtailed her career, Clara taught at the Leipzig Conservatory, composed, and toured frequently. She edited the collected edition of her husband's works (published 1881–93). Her own compositions include works for orchestra (among them a piano concerto), chamber music, songs, and many character pieces for solo piano.

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Germaine Tailleferre (19 April 1892 – 7 November 1983) was a French composer. She studied piano with her mother at home, at the Paris Conservatory where she met other members of Les Six, and with Maurice Ravel at his home in Montfort-l'Amaury. Despite facing opposition from her father and first husband, Tailleferre still pursued her passion and became a successful composer. Her music is often characterized by a light and playful style, with influences from neoclassicism and French Impressionism. Her most important works include the First Piano Concerto, the Harp Concertino, ballets and film scores.

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JoAnn Falletta (born February 27, 1954, in Queens, New York) is an American conductor. She was educated at the Mannes College of Music, Queens College and The Juilliard School. Her teachers include Jorge Mester, Sixten Ehrling, Semyon Bychkov and Leonard Bernstein. Falletta was music director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra from 1991 to 2021, and has been music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra since 1999. Outside of the U.S., she was principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra from 2011 to 2014. Falletta has a discography of over 135 titles, and has won two individual Grammy Awards.

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