We are very pleased about this and recommend that you tune in!
On 23.01. at 20.03 the Deutschlandfunk will broadcast the concert recording of the Philharmonic Orchestra Bremerhaven.
Our composers Mel Bonis, Louise Farrenc and Alma Mahler are represented with the following pieces:
Mel Bonis: Trois femmes de légende
Alma Mahler: Songs
Louise Farrenc: Symphony No. 1 in C minor op. 32
From the website of the Bremerhaven City Theatre:
“Trois femmes de légende” or in German “Three legendary female figures” is the motto of this concert. This is not only the title of the first pieces by the late romantic French composer Mel Bonis. Rarely has a motto also suited Alma Mahler-Werfel and Louise Farrenc, the creators of the rest of the programme, so well. Mel Bonis studied composition with Claude Debussy, but had to abandon her studies and marry at the insistence of her family. She dutifully fulfilled her role as the administrator of an upper middle-class household. She nevertheless managed to compose on the side, especially piano and chamber music, and the colourful piano pieces she orchestrated herself on “legendary” female characters show an artist whose work can absolutely compete with her better-known colleagues.
Alma Mahler-Werfel is considered the last great salon lioness at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The names of her husbands, lovers, companions, friends and acquaintances almost read like a “Who’s Who” of the intellectual greats of the time. She composed during a short phase of her life. Her first husband Gustav Mahler saw a “composing couple” in a “peculiar rivalry” and clearly assigned her the task of “relieving him of the trifles of life”. Of the surviving piano songs, Finnish conducting legend Jorma Panula has sensitively set some for orchestra. The soloist is the Swedish soprano Solgerd Isalv, who is engaged at the Staatstheater Darmstadt, and whose dramatic, luminous mezzo-soprano will lend this expressive music haunting, radiant colours.
Louise Farrenc has always worked as a professional musician. Raised in an artistically successful family of sculptors, trained as a pianist and composer in Paris in the 1820s, she undertook her first concert tours at the age of 17 with her husband, he was a flautist, later ran a music publishing company and became professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842. In the same year, she completed Symphony No. 1 op. 32, which in its classical-romantic character is entirely indebted to a European-influenced musical tradition.
We are looking forward to Sunday and hope you enjoy listening!