Mel Bonis: Trois femmes de légende
Alma Mahler: Songs
Louise Farrenc: Symphony No. 1 in C minor op. 32
“Trois femmes de légende” or in English”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 program, so well. Mel Bonis studied composition with Claude Debussy, but at the insistence of her family had to abandon her studies and marry. Conscious of duty, she 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 colorful 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 of 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 relationship of 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 several for orchestra. The soloist is the Swedish soprano Solgerd Isalv, engaged at the Staatstheater Darmstadt, who will lend hauntingly radiant colors to this expressive music with her dramatically luminous mezzo-soprano.
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 business, and became professor of piano at the Paris Conservatory in 1842. In the same year, she completed the Symphony No. 1 op. 32, which in its classical-romantic character is entirely indebted to a European-influenced musical tradition.
Conductor: Marc Niemann
Mezzo-soprano: Solgerd Isalv