As the heading reveals, the San Francisco-based Women's Philharmonic Orchestra recently won an award enabling them to record a two-volume anthology of works by female composers. The first went to five from the eighteenth century, when it really was unladylike for ladies to compose. Even a century later Mendelssohn's gifted sister, Fanny, found her creative aspirations severely confined. We're told that her Overture (1830), specially reconstructed from the manuscript to open this Volume 2, was just one of several hundred works left to languish in silence after their 'premieres' at the Sunday morning music parties held in the respectable privacy of the family home. The young Beethoven could well have been her model here. The only trouble is that the big denouement for which she so deftly prepares us in fact never arrives. As an infant prodigy, Clara Wieck (Schumann) was in a way luckier: music before marriage was her father's decree. She was a mere 16 when giving the 1835 Leipzig premiere of her A minor Piano Concerto (under Mendelssohn's baton), a work which ''needed weeding'', as Sterndale Bennett once observed, yet which so well deserves its twentieth-century resurrection for its gallant response to the new, romantic Davidsbund challenge of her youthful hero and husband-to-be, her Robert, who incidentally helped with its orchestration.
By 1928, when the 36-year-old Germaine Tailleferre wrote her harp Concertino, the female cause was already won—or at least in her native France. She took her place alongside the five males of Les Six by natural right of craftsmanship, reaffirming her allegiance to their racy wit, after passing glances at Ravel, in the work's finale. But for me the anthology is crowned by the last two pieces composed by Lili Boulanger in 1918 only just before she died, still only 25. Even though substantially edited both by Nadia Boulanger and the staff of the Women's Philharmonic, the longer darkly introspective D'un soir triste leaves no doubt as to what might have come from so searching a spirit. The all-female performers, conductor, soloists and orchestra alike, live up to their considerable reputations and the recording does them justice. Incidentally, only Clara's Piano Concerto is otherwise obtainable on disc.'