Louise Farrenc’s Symphonies++ on Erato

Blule’s cover illustration of Louise Farrenc for the album being discussed (from the album’s Amazon.com Web page)

About a month ago, Erato released a two-CD album of the three symphonies composed by Louise Farrenc. The lion’s share of her catalog is taken by her solo piano music, and she wrote only for solo piano between 1820 and 1830. Her symphonies were composed, respectively in 1842 (Opus 32 in C minor), 1845 (Opus 35 in D major), and 1847 (Opus 36 in G minor). The album also includes her two concert overtures, Opus 23 in E minor and Opus 24 in E-flat major, both composed in 1834.

My first encounter with this music took place on July 23, 2021; and it is more than a little painful to recall. That evening Michael Morgan returned to Davies Symphony Hall to lead the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in a performance of Opus 36. I came away that evening looking forward to my next encounter with Morgan, but it was not to be. He died the following August 20.

I suspect that, on that evening in July, I was one of many encountering Farrenc’s orchestral music for the first time. Morgan could not have done a better job in accounting for the music’s assets. The most outstanding of those assets consisted of (as I wrote at that time) “her highly imaginative approaches to instrumentation, an inventiveness that definitely sets her apart from Schumann and contemporaries such as Felix Mendelssohn.” Those assets are also clearly evident in the performances on the Erato release, performed by the Insula orchestra conducted by Laurence Equilbey. On the other hand, there is also a serious liability in Farrenc’s capacity for working with symphonic forms, which amounted to (again in my earlier words) “a journey that meanders more than following a well-defined course from beginning to end.”

Fortunately, things got better in my encounters with the Farrenc catalog. Far more satisfying was when, this past January, the SFS Chamber Music Series included her Opus 38, a nonet in E-flat major, which amounted to a wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) “sharing space” with a string trio (violin, viola, and cello). This was clearly another instance of “highly imaginative approaches to instrumentation.” In this case, however, her rhetorical approach to this diversity of resources made for a much more satisfying journey, particularly in the way in which her second movement used a theme-and-variations structure to disclose a thoroughly engaging rhetoric of sonorities.

From this I feel I can conclude that Farrenc’s career as a composer involved a well-defined “learning curve” in her “skill set.” In 1834 her shift of attention from solo piano to instrumental ensembles was just getting under way. By 1849 those skills had matured to the point of working with the diverse sonorities of the Opus 38 nonet. The orchestral selections on this new Erato release all come from a time when Farrenc was just beginning to exercise new skills, and it is clear that Opus 38 reflects a much fuller command of those skills.