Next to Beethoven, Louise Farrenc

There's a plethora of terrific concerts on 8 March, International Women's Day. Actually we're splendidly spoilt for choice this year! In the Barbican's offering, Laurence Equilbey conducts her own Insula Orchestra - resident at La Seine Musicale in Paris - in the UK premiere of the Symphony No.3 by Louise Farrenc (1804-1875), with Beethoven's Triple Concerto in the first half starring Natalie Clein (cello), Alice Sara Ott (piano) and Alexandra Conunova (violin). I asked Laurence why she's putting Farrenc side by side with Beethoven, and plenty more besides...

Equilbey in action

Your London concert is on International Women’s Day. This annual event has gained prominence at an extraordinary speed over the past few years. Why do you think it’s important to mark it?

There is definitely a greater appetite from audiences to hear music from female composers of the past than there has been previously, and when is a greater opportunity to celebrate this than on International Women’s Day! However International Women’s Day is not the only day that Insula orchestra will be celebrating female composers. In upcoming programmes we will be performing Fanny Mendelssohn’s Hero et Leander, and Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, and I would love to tackle the work of even more rarely performed female composers, like Clemence de Grandval.

 For those who haven’t yet heard of Louise Farrenc, please tell us a bit more about her. What appeals to you in her music? Why should we all come along and discover her?

I love to always keep an ear out for rare and undervalued works. I discovered the work of Louise Farrenc a few years ago, but I wanted to wait for the perfect moment to perform her Symphony no.3, as it is her finest work. This symphony has been immaculately constructed, and uses fascinating rhythmic motifs, very powerful orchestration, and has beautiful melodic themes which I think are evocative of Mendelssohn (Felix!). It definitely deserves to be a mainstay in the performance canon.

The concert has three female soloists in the Beethoven Triple Concerto and a symphony by Louise Farrenc. How did you decide on the pieces and the performers? 

Symphony no.3 was actually premiered alongside Beethoven’s 5^th, so I wanted to be paired with Beethoven again. I think these works not only enhance each other, but help to complete a broader understanding of 19^th century musical life in Paris. Farrenc and Beethoven are also linked in other ways, as they shared a teacher, Antoine Reicha.

Laurence Equilbey at La Seine Musicale
Photo: Julien Benhamou

It was not a case of gender with the three female soloists – Alexandra Conunova, Natalie Clein and Alice Sara Ott. All three are simply superb musicians who are at the top of their game.

 How and why did you start your own orchestra? What is its mission statement, and why?

Insula orchestra is resident at La Seine Musicale, and we performed the inaguaral concert there in 2017. The venue also provided the inspiration for the name ‘Insula’, the latin for ‘island’, as La Seine Musicale is located on Ile Seguin, just a few miles downstream from Paris. The Insula cortex is also the part of the brain linked to emotion.

Starting a new orchestra like Insula orchestra and having a fantastic new venue like La Seine Musicale gives us the perfect opportunity to approach classical music from a fresh perspective. We have the freedom to take risks, and our ethos is to preserve a place of artistic experimentation, innovation and openness. We have plans to incorporate visual arts, theatre, and technology in many exciting ways.

What are your views generally on the issues facing women in the music business, especially conductors and composers? Have we put up with sexism and discouragement on the grounds of gender for too long? Do you think the situation is improving now?

There are definitely prejudices against women in the music business that have existed for a long time, but we should celebrate that now we have some opportunities to finally enjoy the work of long neglected female composers, like Louise Farrenc. One must not forget however that there are many forgotten composers who were neglected due to racial bias or their social situation, not just due to their gender.

For performers, conductors, soloists, stage designers, the path is a hard one, and there is a need to take some specific measures for more inclusive programme ideas.

What further measures can be taken to aid this process? 

We can make amends to these women, and in turn benefit female composers of the future, by first and foremost exploring their music. For performers, the French government has proposed quota objectives to fill. I also read recently that UK festivals are taking actions to achieve greater gender equality on the stage. It is very important that culture opens itself up to women.

The new concert hall in Paris on the Seine is the second important music venue to open in the French capital in the past few years, the other obviously being the Philharmonie. But London is still struggling to build its first since the 1980s. Why do we need new, proper concert halls in this day and age? 

 At La Seine Musicale we have been very lucky to have the support and commitment of our local government, Departement des Hauts de Seine. In that area of Paris there was previously no big concert hall which could be used for staged projects, with all the modern technical equipment. La Seine Musicale was an unprecedented investment in the musical sector, so we can only hope that similar opportunities will arise in London. Having said this, the Barbican’s willingness to welcome Insula orchestra and our ethos is hugely encouraging.

Tickets for 8 March at the Barbican here.

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Like Rachmaninoff? Try Metallica...

Now and then we need a quick reminder that the world we're in now is - in a good way - something we couldn't have dreamed of back in 1987. Ahead of Boris Giltburg's recital at St John's Smith Square tonight, I'd like to tell you about one of my favourite things that has ever happened on Twitter.

Some months ago I was listening to Boris's recording of the Rachmaninoff Etudes-Tableaux and Moments Musicaux, which I was writing about for Primephonic and had downloaded in high-resolution from their website onto my computer. Boris plays the piano as if it's a 120-piece orchestra, with a grand-scale emotional sweep that can leave you flat on the floor experiencing a kind of legal high, wanting to turn up the volume up as far as you possibly can without scaring the neighbours. Minutes after I put out a tweet about this, a friend made a quip about heavy metal - and then along came Boris himself, suggesting Prokofiev's War Sonatas next [yes indeed - highly recommended], and then admitting he's a bit of a metal-head himself and suggesting some tracks for me to try.

In other words: in today's world you can access the best recordings with the swipe of a mouse, chat about them with your friends, thank the pianist and receive his playlist of entry-level heavy metal recordings, all within moments.

I finished that week listening to Metallica's 'One' and wishing I were 30 years younger. Next thing I knew, other classical musicians started popping up in the Twittersphere asking what took me so long, to which all you can say is "Oh, the usual problems... not knowing where to start listening, scared of looking stupid for not knowing the music, nervous about wearing the wrong thing..."

So am I possibly becoming a metal-head too, at...the age I am...? But guess what? It turns out there's an entire genre for people with long curly hair, seeking extreme musical experiences.

And finally you can blog about it and show everyone what the fuss was about in the first place. Just listen to this. With the volume up. And if the snow permits, do come to SJSS tonight. He's playing this Rachmaninov, with a bunch of Liszt Transcendental Etudes thrown in for good measure...

Real change is afoot as PRS Foundation announces huge gender equality pledge

The PRS for Music Foundation's Europe-wide Keychange project, a large-scale initiative to tackle gender equality in the music business, has spectacular news today: it has achieved commitments from 45 (yes, forty-five) different international musical organisations to make their proceedings gender-equal (yes, 50-50 male-female) by 2022. The organisations in question include the Cheltenham International Music Festival - which has been ahead of the game on this for the past few years, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Manchester Jazz Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, Roundhouse Rising, Spitalfields Music and, indeed, the Proms. These are just a few examples. 


Everyone knew it was time for change; the question was how to make it happen. A century after the first small tranche of women were granted the vote in Britain, it was clear that change of this type doesn't happen on its own. It takes big and ambitious thinking, initiative, imagination, negotiation, tenacity, strong organisation and some active, solid support (in this case, a €200k grant from Creative Europe). Now this splendid development will point the way forward in no uncertain terms.

Speaking to Music Week, Vanessa Reed, CEO of the PRS Foundation, says: "The Keychange network of female artists and industry professionals and the festival partners’ idea of establishing a collective pledge will significantly accelerate change. I hope that this will be the start of a more balanced industry which will result in benefits for everyone.”

Naturally there are some cynical reactions going on - on one side from a certain type of bloke who doesn't like this sort of thing, on the other side from those who wonder why it will take until 2022 in any case (er, FYI, big international festivals usually do start planning several years ahead).

But there's no doubt that the weight of opinion has demonstrably shifted. Imagine all that splendid music we could have had if women had, over the centuries, been accorded the respect and self-respect for creative work that was granted their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons. Imagine those families who would have been happier and more balanced if the mothers, daughters and grandmothers were not angry and frustrated by being kept 'in their place'. The world shot itself in both feet by keeping women down and it's been walking hobbled all this time. Time for change. Thank you, PRS Foundation, and count us in.


Here's a list of the organisations involved:

53 Degrees North (England), Aldeburgh Festival (England), Blissfields (England), Bluedot (England), Borealis (Norway), BreakOut West (Canada), By:Larm (Norway), Canadian Music Week (Canada), Cheltenham Jazz Festival (England), Cheltenham Music Festival (England), Eurosonic Noorderslag (Netherlands), FOCUS Wales (Wales), Granada Experience (Spain), Hard Working Class Heroes (Ireland), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (England), A2IM Indie Week (USA), BBC Music Introducing Stages (UK), Katowice JazzArt Festival (Poland), Kendal Calling (England), Liverpool International Music Festival (England), Liverpool Sound City (England), Manchester Jazz Festival (England), Midem (France), Norwich Sound and Vision (England), North By North East (Canada), NYC Winter Jazzfest (USA), Off The Record (England), Oslo World (Norway), Pop-Kultur (Germany), BBC Proms (England), Roundhouse Rising (England), Spitalfields Music (England), Sŵn (Wales), Trondheim Calling (Norway), Waves Vienna (Austria), Westway LAB (Portugal), Wide Days (Scotland), Gilles Peterson's Worldwide Festival (France)

Beethoven, Shakespeare and Murray Perahia

Murray Perahia's recording of the Beethoven sonatas 'Hammerklavier' Op.106 and 'Moonlight' Op.27 No.2 is just out - sadly too late for my #hammerklavier roundup, but worth waiting for - and full of his extraordinary, empathetic musicianship. I wrote the booklet notes, based on an interview with the great American pianist at his London home, some extracts of which are featured in the trailer below from DG. And if there is anything more astounding than sitting in Perahia's music room while he plays Bach, it is being there while he plays this.

Moreover, his insights into the motivations behind the 'Moonlight' Sonata are absolutely remarkable. Here we find an Aeolian harp - or what Beethoven's idea of one may have been - and some imaginative associations with nothing less than Romeo and Juliet.

Beautiful Music for Bad People: a guest post by Andrew Morris

I've had a weird thing called a Day Off, in between rather stressful patches of work (I'm determined to try and do that more often than twice a year) and am therefore giving the Monday floor to my colleague Andrew Morris, from devillstrill.blogpot.com for an opinion piece: what happens to us listeners when music written for awful purposes turns out to be rather good? Here is his revisiting of Prokofiev's second stab at Stalinist propaganda... JD

Beautiful Music for Bad People

Andrew Morris is a writer on classical music, and teacher. He blogs at devilstrill.blogspot.com and tweets as @devilstrillblog.

Sergei Prokofiev in 1918
photo from Wikipedia

Like many of us, I worry. I worry about a lot of things, but I spend a significant amount of time worrying whether my friends, or my peers, or particularly my students will ever discover the wonder and joy of classical music. Will they ever lose themselves in Bach’s Passions, or thrill to the sound of an orchestra, or puzzle over the edges of music and noise? 

I try to smuggle a little music into my lessons. Students studying Napoleon heard snatches of Beethoven’s Eroica and the story that went with it. Recently, with a GCSE class investigating culture and politics in Stalin’s USSR, I used interview footage featuring the great Russian conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, recounting the way in which, during the Soviet period, books themselves were altered as officials and artists feel in and out of favour. But I had an ulterior motive: the interview, from Bruno Monsaingeon’s documentary The Red Baton, plays with clips of Sergei Prokofiev’s choral ode to Stalin, Zdravitsa (“A Toast” or “Hail to Stalin”). It’s beautiful, sweeping stuff.

It worked. At the end of the clip, my class had understood the Stalinist editing of history, but some had also rather liked the music. “It sounds really nice”, said one. The adjective might have needed work, but the point had been made: classical music could surprise you, and it could also dovetail with history in unexpected ways.

But I only worried more. This particular piece of music raised uncomfortable questions, and the fact of our enjoying it only made it more problematic. Zdravitsa was written in 1939, towards the end of Joseph Stalin’s purges of the Communist Party, the armed forces, and of society at large. Thousands were executed after sham trails; millions more were despatched to Siberia, as slave labour for Stalin’s gulags. And in the midst of this, Stalin had artists, writers, film makers, composers and the rest working to wreath him in propaganda glory, to ensure that the he was elevated to the level of a god in the minds of the population.

The piece was Prokofiev’s second stab at Stalinist propaganda. He’d left the country in 1917, but was tempted back by the authorities in 1936, who promised him the preeminent position amongst Soviet composers. Immediately, he set about writing an epic choral work to make the 20^th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, but he made a disastrous miscalculation: against advice, Prokofiev decided to select texts from the writings of Lenin and Stalin for himself, rather than use officially sanctioned excerpts. This alone was enough to ensure that performance of the piece was refused, and when it came to Zdravitsa, the composer played it safe, writing a smaller and much less daring work.

It does, though, retain some special attraction. The opening melody glows in a way that only Prokofiev seems to have been able to manage. The ending is glittering and stirring enough to almost make one forget the final word of the piece is the name of the architect of so much misery: the choir exclaims “Stalin!” As music, it works, but it’s also very successful propaganda. And there’s the problem. If I enjoy it, am I turning a blind eye to the barbarity it celebrates? And if I invite my students to appreciate it purely musically, am I selling them not beauty, but rather an impression of beauty perverted for evil?

These are questions that belong very much to our time, and I’m puzzling them just as we’re being asked to re-evaluate the work of people guilty of immoral and, in some cases, illegal acts, and as we’re reconsidering art that reflects attitudes we now find unacceptable. A musical ode to Stalin ought to be the simplest case of unacceptable art there is, and yet I find myself unwilling to cast it aside quite so quickly. It’s often easy to discount this stuff on grounds of quality – Prokofiev penned other propaganda pieces which have none of the appeal – though it’s arguably the beauty and skill of the music that makes it such effective propaganda.

We must, though, give ourselves a certain degree of credit. I had chosen that film clip with two purposes in mind, but they were also connected. My students could understand the manipulation at the heart of propaganda while at the same time finding it aesthetically appealing. They weren’t going to become enthusiastic Stalinists because I’d played them some Prokofiev. Understanding that beautiful things could serve terrible masters is valuable in itself and sometimes the impulse to remove the morally problematic denies us the opportunity to consider these sorts of ambiguities. Appreciating the quality of Prokofiev’s music for Stalin doesn’t preclude an understanding of the regime it was created to serve; I would argue it only deepens it. 

AM