“Lise de la Salle Plays Schumann” says the cover of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra program book.
It’s a bit of a tease, since the Schumann Piano Concerto isn’t by the familiar Robert, but by his wife Clara. A prelude to the DSO’s annual Women in Classical Music Symposium, to run Sunday through Wednesday, the program is entirely devoted to works composed by women. The two other pieces are by the 19th-century French composer Louise Farrenc and the 20th-century American Julia Perry.
Music director Fabio Luisi is conducting three performances at the Meyerson Symphony Center. The first performance was Friday night.
Clara Schumann (1819-1896) is the best known of the three composers today, because of her marriage to Robert. One of the most celebrated pianists of the 19th century, she also composed a fair bit, principally piano music. A child prodigy, she was taught both piano technique and composition by her father, Friedrich Wieck.
She composed her A minor Piano Concerto between the ages of 13 and 15. The piano writing is surprisingly accomplished, suggesting now Chopin, now Liszt — now, yes, Robert Schumann (then a fellow student and boarder in the Wieck household). Nine years older, Robert did much of the orchestration, without quite making a silk purse of what he was given.
The central slow movement supplies some lovely melodic material, as do solo piano episodes in the first movement. But most of the orchestral writing simply strings together short motifs, which rise and fall in obvious sequences. The finale outstays its welcome. That said, de la Salle, Luisi and the orchestra performed the piece Friday as if it were great music.
The other two pieces were genuinely arresting, and splendidly performed. Farrenc (1804-1875) was also a famous pianist in her day, and professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire. She had lessons with the pianist-composers Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel and worked on composition with Anton Reicha, the teacher also of Liszt, Berlioz and Franck.
Backed by that distinguished lineage, Farrenc’s 1847 Third Symphony fairly bristles with lively ideas, sophisticated development and contrapuntal wizardry. It’s all the more impressive from an age when France, besotted with opera and ballet, had little interest in symphonies. The flickering Mendelssohnian Scherzo is a special delight, also stirring up more passion than you might expect.
Julia Perry (1924-1979) had the double challenge in her day of being Black as well as female. But, like Farrenc, she had estimable training, studying voice, piano and composition at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, with further work under Nadia Boulanger and Luigi Dallapiccola.
Perry’s eight-minute Study for Orchestra, composed in 1952, makes much of jagged gestures, busily textured. But a flute solo, supported by quiet bassoons and horns, introduces the first of two dreamy episodes. Brilliantly crafted, the piece makes me interested to explore the composer’s 12 symphonies.
With winds on low risers, balances seemed better this week. But, visually as well as sonically, higher risers would be better.
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