Classical Music

Reviews of Gabriel Fauré's Piano Quintet No. 2 at its premiere in Paris in 1921 were effusive. Critics noted loud cheers of the audience and called the piece sublime and "of incomparable nobility." In 1924 Aaron Copland called the Quintet Fauré’s career masterwork. He said, "In profundity it recalls Bach; in grace, Mozart." Fauré's sublime Piano Quintet No. 2 is today's Midday Masterpiece.

Also, this Women's History Month CapRadio highlights a different woman in music each weekday. Today's classical spotlight is on French composer Fernande Decruck (1896-1928).

• Fernande Decruck was born in France on Christmas Day 1896. At age 8 she entered the Toulouse Conservatory then at age 22 the Paris Conservatory. Between ages 15 and 26 at these two schools she won many first and second prizes in harmony, music theory, counterpoint, fugue and more. 
• At age 26 she began to study organ, at which she became renowned including for improvisation. In 1928 she embarked on a tour of organ concerts in the United States. 
• Having married Maurice Decruck, a clarinetist and bassist in 1924, the couple remained in New York for a number of years where he won successful auditions as a bassist and solo saxophonist with the New York Philharmonic (under Arturo Toscanini). 
• By 1933 they were both back in France, though living in different cities as he founded a music publishing house in Paris while she taught in Toulouse. They eventually divorced in 1950. 
• In 1942 Fernande resigned her teaching post and for about the next five years devoted herself entirely to composition, proving a prolific composer whose works won mostly positive reviews from critics. She would eventually compose chamber music, ballet, choral works, film music, concertos, and over 40 works for the saxophone.
• After another brief stay in the United States in the late 1940s, Fernande returned to France where she was appointed a professor at Fontainebleau, but this was a significant drop in stature from her previous positions. 
• Decruck's compositions from here on were mainly revisions of her earlier works, and she wrote her final works in 1951. 
• Fernande suffered a stroke in 1952 then another in 1954 which she did not survive.