Fernande Decruck: Concertante Works, Vol. 2. Jackson Symphony; Matthew Aubin, conductor. Jeremy Crosmer, cello; Misuru Kubo, viola; and Mahan Esfahani, harpsichord. Claves Records (CD 50-3108). Total time: 64:43
Agathe Backer Grøndahl: Songs & Piano Works. Karen Vourc’h, soprano; Anne Le Bozec, piano. Aparté Music (AP374). Total time: 58:00
DIGITAL REVIEW — March is Women’s History Month, so it’s appropriate that two groundbreaking recordings just came out in celebration of female composers who should be much better known than they are. The Jackson Symphony, conducted by Matthew Aubin, released the world-premiere recording of instrumental works by Fernande Decruck, while soprano Karen Vourc’h created an album of songs by Agathe Backer Grøndahl, featuring pianist Anne Le Bozec.
The daughter of a merchant, Decruck was born in Gaillac, a village in Southern France, in 1896. Her piano studies started in childhood at the Conservatoire de Toulouse. She went on to the Conservatoire de Paris, where she won prizes for her organ playing and composition, attracting the admiration of Olivier Messiaen and Marcel Duchamp, among others. If she is known at all, it’s for her many solo and chamber works for saxophone, which she composed for her husband, saxophonist and clarinetist Maurice Decruck.
This is the second album by Aubin and Michigan’s Jackson Symphony dedicated to Decruck’s practically unheard concertante works (i.e., works for solo instrument and orchestra); the first, released on the Claves label in 2022, included pieces for soloists on saxophone, horn, trumpet, and harp. The latest volume focuses on other instruments.
Cellist Jeremy Crosmer does the honors in Decruck’s Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1932), her earliest known large-scale composition for orchestra and soloist. The shimmering strings and the uneven, meandering phrase lengths of the first movement place the composer squarely in the midst of early 20th-century French orchestral writing. Crosmer’s playing is richly expressive and fluid. The slow second movement opens with simple repeating motions in the violins and woodwinds that could be a nod to the Orientalism that had gripped Paris at the turn of the century.
Decruck’s four-movement Sonata in C-sharp (1943) was created for either saxophone or viola. Here, violist Misuru Kubo takes the solo in an orchestral arrangement by the composer. What strikes the ear in the first movement is the unusual orchestration, a predominance of harp contrasted with low-register trombones and what sounds like bass clarinet. The viola line has a sweet, Romantic arc. The second (“Christmas”) and third (“Spinning Wheel”) movements have programmatic titles, the latter a storm of swirling perpetual motion, which Kubo manages to shape into meaningful phrases.
The Trianons (1946) is written for orchestra with solo keyboard, here Mahan Esfahani at the harpsichord. Named after the royal buildings at Versailles, this is a neo-Baroque suite. The highlight is the wild, asymmetrical Allegro third movement, with Esfahani at dissonant odds with a frenetic orchestra, followed by sequential series of contrapuntal motions evoking Bach. The work has a modern, mid-century sound quite unlike the other Decruck examples here.
Aubin had thought that an orchestral piece called The Bells of Vienna: Suite of Waltzes (1935) was lost. Little by little, from various sources, he pieced together parts for all the instruments, including a vibraphone, which was still fairly rare. The Jackson Symphony gives a proper Viennese twirl to this skillfully crafted waltz that speeds up almost to a jig in the middle. Decruck, always with an ear for instrumental colors, brings in an oom-pah-pah tuba for a touch of Bavarian flavor.
Although the songs and piano works of Agathe Backer Grøndahl have been recorded before, they are far from standards in the repertoire, especially outside her native Norway. Soprano Vourc’h and pianist Anne Le Bozec’s performance therefore provides a welcome introduction to this gifted composer.
Grøndahl (1847-1907) left her native country at age 18 to study piano in Berlin. She made her concerto debut with Edvard Grieg in 1868 (they remained lifelong friends) and enjoyed a high-profile solo career until extreme hearing loss made that work impossible. For nearly the last two decades of her life, she focused instead on teaching and composition.
On this recording, Vourc’h sings some 20 songs (Grøndahl wrote a total of 258!), taken from several opus numbers. The opening Finnish folk lullaby, simply yet stunningly sung a cappella at the low end of the soprano’s range, prepares the listener for the characteristic bleakness of the Scandinavian sound. Yet this is followed by the Brahmsian richness of “Saa lagde jeg ud” (So I Leave), illustrating the other extreme of Grøndahl’s musical background.
Another style is demonstrated in the haunting “Der står en Sorg” (There Is a Sorrow), which sets a poem by Vilhelm Krag about a chronic state of depression attached to one’s life “like a long shadow.” The spare, angular melody jumps up a fifth, down a fourth, while the piano plays along with single pitches. The piece has a dark beauty, distractingly interrupted by Vourc’h’s uncontrolled vibrato on certain pitches. That vocal issue does not occur in every song, fortunately.
Interspersed between groupings of songs, Le Bozec plays some Grøndahl works for solo piano: the Fantasistykker (Fantasy Pieces), Op. 36 — its 10 movements split into two parts — and the Concert Study in D-flat major, Op. 11, No. 2. Schumann clearly inspired Op. 36; it has movements named after folk dances or given programmatic titles such as “Fresh Courage!” and “Evening Wind.”
Performed by Le Bozec with the grace and a genteel, reserved espressivity appropriate to a turn-of-the-century parlor, the miniatures are very much of their tradition. Grøndahl learned her craft well, and these are pleasant pieces. They are in no way as interesting as the songs, however. If American singers are willing to tackle the Norwegian, there’s quite a body of work here to be added to the standard recital repertoire.
Every March, as recordings such as these two are released, I am once again amazed and saddened by how many female composers are still to be rediscovered, yet encouraged by each revelation of a hidden woman who is finally brought into the light.
