Cécile Chaminade
CONCERTINO FOR FLUTE & ORCHESTRA
Cécile Louise Stéphanie Chaminade was one hell of a woman. Though she hailed from a non-musical family, she was something of a musical prodigy - writing sacred music at eight. Bizet, recognised her talent, and urged her parents to make sure that she received a sound musical education - as she was unable to get just that at the Paris Conservatoire because women were not admitted.
That didn't stop her - she made her debut as a concert pianist in her teens and toured widely. In the course of her long life Chaminade became a noted conductor/composer writing around 350 works - including a comic opera, a ballet, a choral symphony, about a hundred songs, books of short lyric piano pieces and this Concertino for Flute & Orchestra.
Chaminade made no pretence at writing so-called "lofty" music; she rarely makes intellectual demands on the listener. Instead she often concentrated on music that is richly melodic, highly resourceful, and always thoroughly relaxed and relaxing.
Bernard Clarke, RTÉ lyric fm
IF YOU LIKED CHAMINADE'S CONCERTINO . . .
. . . you'll probably also enjoy this concert in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's 2007/08 season, at the National Concert Hall or broadcast live on RTÉ lyric fm.
Experience more of that particularly French sound-world, Messiaen's massive love-poem and orchestral tour de force, the Turangalîla-symphonie, along with music by Ravel. For more information, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2008/0222/nso.html
CÉCILE CHAMINADE, 1857-1944
Born in Paris, Chaminade studied with her mother and a number of private tutors, gave her first concert at eighteen and made a successful career as a composer, in the United States as well as Europe.
She composed nearly four hundred works, most of them piano pieces and songs; the sheet music of one piece, Scarf Dance, sold more than five million copies. In 1913 she was awarded the Legion d'Honneur and when she died in 1944, Time Magazine called her "the most famous woman composer who ever lived". Married in 1901 to the music publisher Louis-Mathieu Carbonel, she never re-married after his death in 1907.
