Emilie Mayer: Piano Concerto - Symphony No. 1 - Overtures (Symphonic Works, Vol. 1)

Germany in the mid-19th century was neither the place nor the time for a woman to succeed as a composer. Emilie Mayer’s single-minded determination to do just that led her to promote concerts of her works at Berlin’s Royal Theater and win praise from at least some male music critics. Mayer’s surviving orchestral scores, rescued from obscurity in recent times, were brought to life in 2025 by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin during a festival devoted to her music. The ensemble’s period instrument colors and debonair performances, recorded live for this, the first in a trio of albums, capture Mayer’s free-flowing inventive brilliance. Her Symphony No. 1, most likely written in the 1840s, owes a debt to the music of Felix Mendelssohn but remains strikingly individual in its deft changes of mood: listen, for instance, to the third movement with its characterful minor-key opening and contrasting lyrical middle section. While seriousness is Mayer’s default position, her sense of fun breaks through in the Piano Concerto, a classically poised work delivered with effervescent charm by Alexander Melnikov on a Blüthner concert grand from 1867.