Essential Tailleferre
The only female member of the "Les Six" group of French composers (which included Poulenc, Milhaud and Honegger), Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983) enjoyed a long career as a composer. She was a prize-winning student at the Paris Conservatoire and it was there she befriended the composers who with her made up the ground-breaking group.
Read more…Promoted by Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie (who described Tailleferre as his musical "daughter"), "Les Six" was inspired by a general reaction against Impressionism and helped to celebrate the youthful French spirit that had suffered during World War I. Tailleferre was also close to Maurice Ravel and was commissioned by Diaghilev to write for the Ballets Russes. Her piano concerto was performed by Alfred Cortot, and Serge Koussevitzky conducted the Boston Symphony in her Harp Concertino. But for Tailleferre membership of "Les Six" was a double-edged sword: it advanced her music and brought it to wider public attention, but she was singled out as the only female member, which she found degrading and unnecessary. Critics derided her works in gendered terms as "feminine", "dreamy", and "slight". Yet the music she was composing in the first part of the 20th century is bold and original, with harmonies and rhythms equal to Debussy's, while her more mature works reveal a taste for the avant garde. Her music has a natural grace, spontaneity, and charm redolent of the 18th-century masters, but always with a distinct individuality.