Stratigou’s 5th Album of Farrenc’s Piano Works

Portrait of Louise Farrenc on the cover of the fifth Naxos album of her piano music (which is the same as the portrait on previous albums)

This past Friday I received an announcement from the Naxos of America PR Team that the latest installment in recordings of the complete piano works of nineteenth-century composer Louise Farrenc, performed by Maria Stratigou, was ready for release by Grand Piano. This is the fifth volume given the title Fugues • Mélodies • Valses, which does not quite account for the entirety of the album. That said, the six tracks of fugues and one of the waltzes are all world premiere recordings.

That waltz is the Opus 51, the second “Valse Brillante,” which is coupled with the first, Opus 48. Whether or not Stratigou selected that title from Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 18 can be left as an exercise for the musicologists! That said, Chopin never shows up on her Wikipedia page, from which we learn that her composition teacher was Anton Reicha. Personally, I find both of these waltz compositions engaging; and, if there are occasional tropes reminiscent of Chopin, they are still perfectly capable of speaking for themselves!

More interesting (for me at least) were six of the fugues from the Opus 22 collection. These ran from the sixth to the eleventh, and they are world premiere recordings. Sadly, Farrenc’s Wikipedia page does not enumerate these fugues. This makes me all the more curious about how many she composed and when Grand Piano will account for the rest of them in future releases!