Browsing the obituaries of notable citizens in the New York Times in September 1875, readers may have come across an obit for “Mme. Jean Louise Farrenc…a musician and composer of considerable distinction in the generation immediately preceding the present one…She has published rondos, divertissements and airs variée, six fugues for the piano, several orchestral overtures, some concerted pieces, airs and variations for the piano and violin, and several airs and variations from the operas in vogue in her time.”
Although Madame Farrenc received a certain level of respect during her lifetime as a pianist and as a composer for the piano and chamber music, the gender stereotypes she confronted as a 19th Century woman would continue to limit her reputation, particularly for her orchestral works, for another 140 years. Happily, the classical music world, now painfully aware of the injustices done to women composers in the past, is—at last—taking stabs at correcting the gender prejudices that have been so insidiously ingrained in culture and society. Participating in that correction are the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Aram Demirjian, that have not only been adding contemporary women composers to their programs, but are also bringing deserving composers like Farrenc—and their large scale works—to the attention of 21st Century audiences.
In its latest Chamber Classics series concert this past Sunday afternoon, Demirjian and the orchestra chose Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3 in G minor, op. 36, a work from 1847 that premiered in Paris two years later. The work clearly revealed Farrenc as a musical heir to the structural inventiveness of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, in many ways carrying the work’s distinctive charm to an even higher level. Just as the audience was hearing the work for the first time, the orchestra’s players were on similar footing. Nevertheless, the intricate interplay between strings and woodwinds was excellent and the ensemble handled the dynamic mood changes with the necessary boldness and crispness.
On the first half of the program, Associate Concertmaster Gordon Tsai stepped into the solo spotlight in an energetic performance of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in D major, K. 211. Tsai was happiest in the work’s brightest, most vigorous moments of tempo, his phrasing cascading with waves of musical gravity. While the first movement cadenza seemed to dominate its neighboring sections in importance, it succeeded in imparting a bit of human drama into the storm.
In his opening remarks, Maestro Demirjian indicated, as far as archival data reveals, that all three works on the concert were getting their first performance by the KSO. Truly, the afternoon’s opener, William Grant Still’s Darker America (1926) was an ear-opener and provided a hefty amount of musical food for thought. The work, more successfully than not, succeeds at weaving together threads of spirituals, blues textures, and jazz, layered on a foundation cloth of Euro-American classical music. One couldn’t help wondering what Still would have created on the subject, say 30 years later.
