A long-term advocate of music by neglected female composers, Măcelaru spoke to us last month about exploring the remarkable story of a woman who played 'an incredibly prominent role in French cultural life', the relationship between Barraine's music and her political convictions, the treasures which still languish in the archives, and his mission to encourage publishers to match the efforts of artists by ensuring that good performing editions are readily available for repertoire which has fallen off the collective radar...
How did this project get off the ground?
A few years ago, we had a conversation with the artistic team at Radio France where I pushed for us to put more effort into finding out about composers who just disappeared from the canon. One of my team members said: ‘There’s this one composer who used to be Managing Director of Radio France…you hear her name mentioned, but nobody really performs her music’. We started going through all our archives and discovered a lot of music that had never been performed at all. We also began collaborating with the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Elsa Barraine Society in France, which has been working on restoring her music and making it available.
The Second Symphony has become a bit more popular over the last couple of years: I did it at Carnegie Hall with the Orchestre National de France in November and performed it a couple of times in Paris, and it was played at the Proms last season, but even so I'm always surprised at how many people have never heard it before.
After getting to know the symphonies I started looking into other pieces which might complement them, and the big discovery was the incredible tone-poem Song-Koï - it’s written in such an interesting way. When I presented it to the orchestra for the first time, every single player was blown away by the beauty of the piece. I knew the impact it would make, and I’m so excited for a wider audience to hear the sheer quality of Barraine’s music.
Where does her music sit in relation to her contemporaries?
The influence which Messiaen had on her music is very clear - they studied together and were very close friends throughout their lives. But I hear echoes of different composers in each of the pieces on the album: Barraine was quite versatile in adapting her approach and drawing on different soundworlds to achieve the effect she wanted.
You hear the influence of Shostakovich in Symphony No. 2, especially in the weight and heaviness of the slow movement. But there are also many gestures in the first movement that remind me of Britten’s directness of sound, particularly in works like the Sinfonia da Requiem and Les Illuminations. The combination of Debussy and Messiaen is very present in Song-Koï, and in Les Tziganes you hear a very specific French colour.
Barraine was very cognisant of the past whilst keeping in line with her contemporaries. She’s absolutely part of that constellation of composers that were really leading the charge in the twentieth century, both in terms of innovation and preserving the traditions of the past.
Why do you think her music fell off the radar?
She was such a prominent figure in French cultural life: especially in her mature years, she was really the person deciding the direction of classical music in France through her work with the Ministry of Culture. Given that she died right on the cusp of the twenty-first century, I found it quite shocking that her legacy has been forgotten so quickly. This work to bring her music and her story to people is so important – we need reference points to encourage a younger generation of audiences and musicians to embrace her work. I hope these pieces will eventually become part of the curriculum and the repertoire.
One important aspect of her life which I discovered is that she was a really significant figure in the French Resistance during World War Two. Barraine was a very bold personality with strong Socialist views which led to her being criticised and set aside, and there’s a strong parallel with Copland there – at about the same time in his life he was decried as a Communist and even investigated by the FBI. And both of them span basically the entire twentieth century, so the similarities between them are very striking. I think the fact that she was a woman also had a lot to do with her not being fully appreciated as a composer during her lifetime, so we’re trying to right all these wrongs.
The Elsa Barraine Foundation does a lot of work on her behalf; I met with them and they were very helpful in discovering everything we needed, but I do think that a comprehensive catalogue needs to be created because there’s an incredible wealth of compositions. We could only fit four works on the album, but we envisaged it as a multi-disc project which we hope to complete at some point, and there are several pieces we’ve put aside for a second volume. We haven’t even scratched the surface - none of her concerti or chamber music have been recorded yet…
What might feature on that second instalment?
There’s quite a lot of music that she wrote for Radio France to accompany storytelling programmes, which could make a beautiful album for children. And I’d like to explore the works we discovered where there’s not even an archive recording – there’s a handful of works that were commissioned but never premiered. The next natural step would be to look at those and see why…
Do good performing editions exist for most of her music, or is that a work in progress?
There’s a lot more research to be done – an original version of the score has recently resurfaced, and it’s very different from what we recorded. I really do hope this recording encourages publishing houses to look at her music and do the necessary work. This is the big problem with Les Tziganes and Song-Koï – what’s available is pretty difficult to read! I run into this problem quite a lot, because I’m always interested in looking at composers that were sidelined for one historical reason or another and I would say the biggest hurdle in why their music isn’t performed more is that it’s not available in legible performing editions.
I’m passionate about encouraging young conductors to study and perform music by female composers, especially of the past – it’s so important to make people aware that female composers aren’t a twenty-first-century phenomenon. I remember doing a masterclass of nineteenth-century female composers, and I had to change the repertoire at the last minute because the candidates called me to say that they simply couldn’t get their hands on the scores. It broke my heart, but that’s the reality at the moment.
We all have a responsibility not just to make sure that this music is performed, but that it’s approached and prepared with the proper intensity and intention. One thing which I try to instil into my conducting students is that a really powerful, committed performance of something that isn’t a straight-up masterpiece can go much further than a bad performance of core repertoire.
I also encourage all my colleagues to espouse the mindset that it’s better to not do something at all than to do it without commitment. Time-pressures and budgets often mean that performances of new or neglected works don’t receive the proper attention, and that doesn’t make a great argument for anyone. I focused so much on the detail and quality for this recording because you only do the music justice if you prepare it as carefully as you would a Mahler or Beethoven symphony.
Did you meet anyone who knew Barraine personally in the course of preparing this recording?
There was nobody in the orchestra who had met her, because she wasn’t active there in the latter part of her life, but I’ve been in contact with various people who knew her and wanted to continue her legacy. Hopefully the buzz around this recording will reach people who might come forward and can contribute personal anecdotes and information about her music. Who knows what else might be out there? It’s so easy for things to slip through the cracks - I remember discovering material in the Philadelphia Orchestra library that Rachmaninoff had corrected but had never seen the light of day, and I incorporated those into some of my recordings. There’s a lot that dies with the composer if you don’t make a concerted effort to bring it to light.
Orchestre National de France, Cristian Măcelaru
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