Augusta Holmès: Allegro feroce

Available for over a year

The BBC Concert Orchestra perform Holmès 1876 work live on Radio 3 in Concert on International Women's Day 2018. Augusta Holmès was a French composer of Irish descent. Although deeply musical, Holmès was discouraged by her parents and had to wait until their deaths to embark on her composing career. A courageous, principled character who didn't play by the book, Holmès had a large circle of artistic friends and admirers, including Liszt, Rossini, Saint-Saëns and César Franck (with whom she studied). She also had five children with the poet Catulle Mendés. Dr Anastasia Belina-Johnson, an academic who has been researching Holmès' life and work on behalf of the BBC/AHRC's Forgotten Women Composers project, notes that Augusta "became respected as a composer of music that was free of dainties and sentimentalities – in fact, her music was often characterised as ‘masculine’ and ‘virile’!" In 1895, Holmès was the first woman to have an opera premiered in Paris. She composed large-scale orchestral and choral works, writing a piece for 1,200 performers for the centenary of the French Revolution. Yet while the first recordings of Holmès’s music were made in 1994, much of her catalogue still remains undiscovered.