Das Jahr (The Year)

Fanny Mendelssohn’s own description of Das Jahr as a ‘small piece which is giving me much fun’ reflects the challenges women composers faced to have their work taken seriously in the 19th century.

It is, after all, a substantial piece, with each movement representing a month of the year, and the overall piece (lasting 50 minutes) being of a standard to sit alongside pillars such as Schumann’s Davidsbündlertanzen.

Even with the OAE’s efforts to make the work of Fanny Mendelssohn and other women composers more widely known, there still exists one big obstacle: women simply weren’t given the opportunity to write for orchestras.

This concert, with fortepianist Olga Pashchenko, features a reimagining of the music by four contemporary composers: Roxanna Panufnik, Electra Perivolaris, Freya Waley-Cohen and Errollyn Wallen.

Electra Perivolaris takes ‘March’ as her starting point, followed by a contribution inspired by ‘April’ from Errollyn Wallen. Freya Waley-Cohen’s commission draws on ‘her beautiful and elegant June serenade with visitations or memories of the darkly playful February scherzo’.

Roxanna Panufnik’s piece is inspired by the closing movement, ‘Nachspiel’, which she says ‘appealed to me with its intense focus on harmony which moves and never really settles until the very end.’