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Insula Orchestra/Equilbey (Erato, two CDs) Laurence Equilbey and her orchestra champion compatriot Louise Farrenc’s orchestral works, revealing energy and verve to rival her 19th-century peers Louise Farrenc was born in 1804, just a few years before Schumann and Mendelssohn, and her music inhabits the same early Romantic world as theirs, with its roots particularly in Beethoven and sometimes indebted also to Weber. Farrenc lived and studied in Paris, where her piano teachers included Hummel and Moscheles; she went on to have a successful career as a pianist, and became a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire – the institution’s only female professor in the whole of the 19th century – but at that time women were unable to study composition there, and so from the age of 15 she took lessons privately with Anton Reicha.Musical life in Paris in the 1830s and 40s was dominated by opera. Symphonic concerts were rare, not only because the symphony itself was still viewed very much as a German genre, but also because orchestras were few and far between in the capital. So Farrenc composed mostly piano and chamber pieces – the 1849 Nonet, for wind quintet and string quartet, is probably her best known work. Apart from two sets of variations for piano and orchestra and an unfinished piano concerto, all of her orchestral music, three symphonies composed between 1842 and 1847, and two overtures from 1834, is brought together on these discs from Laurence Equilbey and her period-instrument orchestra, Insula. Continue reading...