The names of Augusta Holmès, Lili Boulanger, Germaine Tailleferre, Cécile Chaminade and Mélanie Bonis would be more familiar had they been men. Perhaps “Liberté, Egalité, Sororité” should have been the slogan for this International Women’s Day concert featuring a mighty handful of French composers. It was a significant gesture and fascinating for being unfamiliar music. Boulanger, who died in 1918 at 24, had promised most, and the piquancy of D’Un Matin de Printemps (A Spring Morning) captured the tragedy that she didn’t live to see her own summer.
Holmès’s symphonic poem Andromède accorded the mythological Greek the vivid flourish of so many classical paintings: the strong brass opening alone showed a determination to confound stereotypes, with the long string lines also betraying her affinity for Wagnerian expansiveness. It was resonantly delivered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under the baton of Jessica Cottis. Tailleferre’s Concerto Grosso had all the wacky exuberance of other composers of Les Six, and the piano duo of Pascal and Ami Rogé, the Lunar Saxophone Quartet and the wordless singing of the BBC National Chorus of Wales all underlined the work’s unusual colouring. Noriko Ogawa’s performance of Chaminade’s Konzertstück conjured a vibrant picture of another pianist-composer, while the sequence of Mel Bonis’s Trois Femmes de Légende – Salome, Ophelia and Cleopatra – was unfortunate for expiring feebly.
The current consciousness-raising rightly rebalances historical wrongs but, while it has seen 19th-century male critics knocked for their appalling condescension, deliberately over-positive bias retrospectively applied by female critics of today won’t necessarily help the cause.
