Manacorda's thrills and spills at Prom 72

At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA, looking miserable. So she pushed him towards the piano with the words: ‘Come on, Professor, give us a tune!’

I couldn’t help thinking of those words on Friday night, when we heard the first Proms performance of a symphony written in 1847 by a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. The Third Symphony of Louise Farrenc is full of well-crafted melodic lines, neatly configured to fit maddeningly predictable textbook chord progressions. It’s delicately orchestrated, but even the feathery flutes of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment couldn’t disguise the professor’s failure to give us a single memorable tune. This is not a popular opinion. ‘Be careful not to upset her fans,’ a distinguished musician warned me after the concert. ‘They’re almost as fierce as the Clara Schumann flash mob.’ He was right: nearly all the references to Farrenc on the internet are gushingly enthusiastic, celebrating not just her music’s technical competence, which is fair enough, but also its ‘distinctive voice’. Really? It’s true that in the scherzo of the Third Symphony you hear a distinctive voice, but unfortunately it’s Mendelssohn’s.

I found only one snippet of mildly qualified praise, from a critic suggesting that Farrenc was a gifted ‘second-tier’ composer. Which raises the question: if she belongs to the second tier, where do we place Hummel and Berwald, both of whom sometimes painted by numbers but could also produce heart-stopping melodies and modulations? And would this symphony have been showcased at the Proms if the composer’s Christian name had been Louis instead of Louise?