Violinist Raphaelle Moreau on Redescovering Forgotten Women Composers

Raphaelle Moreau's latest album presents forgotten works from three women composers from the early 20th century in Europe that had fallen into oblivion

 

Recorded with French pianist Célia Oneto Bensaid under the Mirare record, the album presents Henriëtte Bosmans' Sonata for Violin and Piano (Netherlands, 1918,) Dora Pejačević's Violin Sonata, Op. 43, (Croatia, 1919,) Grażyna Bacewicz's "Kaprys No. 3" for Violin and Piano (Poland, 1930,) and "Oberek No. 1" (Poland, 1951,) and Marguerite Canal's Sonata for violin and piano (France, 1925.)

You can purchase the CD at this link.

 

Where did the idea for the CD come from?

We have been playing together for more than ten years so first of all, I couldn’t have imagined this album with anyone else than Celia!

The whole concept of the album came from Marguerite Canal’s sonata which we discovered five years ago. It was astonishing for us to realize that this sonata, a true masterpiece, with colors reminiscent of Ravel and Fauré was absolutely unknown and that nobody had heard of Canal, who was the second woman (after Lili Boulanger) to have won the Prix de Rome of the Villa Medici.

The idea is for the album to be a snapshot of the time around 1920´s Europe, what was happening during this decade in four different countries, and who these women were that wrote those three sonatas.

All of these composers lived at the same time, but that’s probably the only thing they had in common — their music is very different stylistically and esthetically. We don’t think they were even aware of each other’s existence.

Above it all, however, we fell in love with the music we were discovering and simply wanted to follow our musical instinct.

 

Can you tell us more about the composers?

Croatian composer Dora Pejacevic came from an aristocratic family and received an extensive education from the best teachers in Europe. Musically however she was mainly self-taught. She was a fascinating personality and emancipated herself from her background by enrolling as a nurse during the First World War.

Her second violin sonata, the "Slavic Sonata" that we perform on the album is a work of very contrasting characters. In addition to the strong folk inspiration, her Slavic sensibility leans towards a certain romanticism and is almost reminiscent of Russian music.

In the Netherlands, Henriette Bosmans was one of the most celebrated pianists and composers of her generation (she performed with the Concertgebouw Orchestra more than twenty times.)

She enjoyed a well-established musical life in the Netherlands until the Second World War when she was forced to stop performing because she was Jewish.

She wrote orchestral works, chamber music, and many songs.

Her sonata, an early work, is a display of her skill and capability as a composer. Each movement is a feat; the work ends with a fugue, the ultimate form that generally crowned composition studies.

This is what we loved right away about the compositions. These women had a fighting spirit about them and faced a lot of adversity. Their works are serious and ambitious additions to the violin repertoire.

To complement these three big works, we added two small and very virtuosic pieces by Grazina Bacewicz.

She was herself a violin virtuoso and her work features seven violin concerti.

"Oberek" and "Kaprys" were written twenty years after the sonatas and add in some freshness between these three more serious works.

I was charmed right away by the unique language and authenticity in Bacewicz’s music. I am discovering a whole bunch of new brilliant and demanding show pieces for violin, extremely well written and very fun to play (but always a challenge to perform!)

 

How important is it to you to highlight these women composers, largely forgotten by history?

I realized that over the course of my musical education, I never studied a female composer, whether in the Paris Conservatory or later on during my studies in Switzerland. For a few years, together with Celia, we have been researching forgotten and unpublished music written by women.

The list of composers is so long and every week I keep discovering lost works that are absolutely incredible.

We are lucky to be part of a collective of musicians in Paris led by Héloïse Luzzati that works very actively to research and rediscover music written by female composers.

It seems like female composers are more and more part of the concert repertoire. But looking more closely at it, it is often the same few that are being played because of a famous last name (Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, Lili Boulanger…)

We wanted to publish this album because of the quality of the works that we found and I hope that it will participate in shedding light on these women.

I have seen that the Bosmans sonata has been recorded twice since we first discovered her music, so we definitely are on the right path!

 

How does it feel to work on one of the first recordings of a piece?

It gives us an immense freedom because we can’t base our interpretation on anything else other than on how we read and understand the score. It is also a responsibility because we want the listeners to fall in love with it as much as we did.

To a lot of people, our recording will be the introduction to this music, and ideally, our performance convinces the audience to discover more.

We performed the pieces after analyzing and getting to know the musical language of each composer by playing other works from their repertoire to become familiar with their writing.

But we mainly went with our musical instinct and played with our hearts.

 

You have been performing together for years now. Can you tell us about your musical collaboration?

The idea for the album is something that we came up with together and it was the most natural thing for me to do this project with Celia.

We have been performing together for now many years and we always try to discover new scores and incorporate female composers into our concert programs.

Our friendship and mutual admiration made this whole project so much fun and we are already looking forward to the next chapter together!

 

 

French violinist Raphaëlle Moreau was awarded the first Grand Prize of the Andrea Postacchini Competition and nominated in the "Rising Star" category at the French Victoires de la musique in 2020. She is a laureate of the Nicati-de-Luze Foundation, the Banque Populaire Foundation, and the Fondation Marcel Bleuestein-Blanchet pour la Vocation.

Appointed concertmaster of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester at the age of twenty-one, Raphaëlle Moreau has collaborated with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Vladimir Jurowski, Jonathan Nott and Lorenzo Viotti and has performed at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Musikverein in Vienna and the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg.

She is regularly invited as guest concertmaster in various orchestras such as Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, the Munich Philharmonic, the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, the Noord Nederlands Orkest and the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse.

She plays a violin from Carlo Tononi generously lent by Michael Guttman.

 

Pianist Célia Oneto Bensaid collaborates and creates many pieces of which she is the dedicatee — by David Hudry, Kaija Saariaho, Diana Syrse, Camille Pépin, and Fabien Waksman.

A Yamaha artist, supported by the Banque Populaire Foundation and the Safran Foundation, Célia is a laureate of numerous international solo and chamber music competitions (Piano Campus, Cziffra Foundation, Nadia and Lili Boulanger competition, Pro Musicis, HSBC Prize of the Aix-en-Provence lyric festival, etc.). She received the audience prize of the Société des Arts de Genève in 2017. In 2020, she became the first winner in the “Classical Music” category of the K2 Trophy.

Recently she has been accompanied by the orchestras of Avignon-Provence under the direction of Debora Waldman, Brittany under the direction of Aurélien Azan Zielinski, the Republican Guard under the baton of François Boulanger, the Toulon Opera under the direction of Lucie Leguay.

Célia is Artiste in residence at the Opera Grand Avignon on the 22/23 and 23/24 seasons.