Louise Farrenc’s three symphonies represent a double triumph: over sexual prejudice, in an age when female creative artists suffered from so many social constraints, and over the French establishment’s resistance to a quintessential German genre. Unless you were Beethoven, your symphonies stood little chance in the opera-mad Paris of the 1840s. Farrenc, whose piano music had already been praised by Schumann for its ‘subtle aura of romanticism’, was undeterred. Her First Symphony of 1841 – coincidentally the year of Mendelssohn’s Scottish and Schumann’s Spring and D minor symphonies – was only heard in Paris after its premiere in Brussels. But with Symphony No 3 of 1847 Farrenc enjoyed the rare honour of a Paris premiere by the city’s prestigious Société des Concerts. Reactions were enthusiastic, if faintly patronising. Of No 3 one critic noted that Farrenc, ‘alone among her sex in Europe, revealed genuine learning united with grace and taste’, while another praised ‘a strong, spirited work in which the brilliance of the melodies contends with the variety of the harmony’.

Trained in the German Classical tradition, Farrenc revered Beethoven and evidently knew her Mozart and Mendelssohn. But these symphonies are no mere epigones. From its groping slow introduction to its finale, by turns fiery and emollient, No 1 is scrupulously crafted, tautly developed (Farrenc never meanders) and rich in shapely melody. Her sensitivity to woodwind colour is heard at its most poetic in the changing colours of the Adagio, with its echoes of bel canto opera. The muscular Minuet, with its abrasive cross-rhythms, faintly recalls Mozart’s G minor Symphony No 40, while the rhythmic breakdown at the climax of the first movement’s development inevitably recalls the corresponding point in the Eroica. Yet throughout both these symphonies any influences are thoroughly absorbed and personalised.

If anything, No 3, with its haunting opening for lone oboe, is even finer. The powerfully worked outer movements balance feverish energy and lyrical grace. There is fierce drama at the heart of the finale, where the violent fragmentation of the main theme distantly evokes the finale of Mozart’s No 40. The slow movement, opening atmospherically with clarinet, horns and soft timpani, mingles solemnity and sweetness, while the scurrying, secretive Scherzo puts an individual gloss on the Mendelssohn fairy Scherzo. A ‘strong, spirited work’ indeed.

There have been spasmodic earlier recordings of both these symphonies but Laurence Equilbey and her superb 45-strong period orchestra are more than equal to the competition. In their lucidity, colour and feeling for the music’s architecture, with climaxes unerringly prepared and clinched, these performances would be hard to better. Equilbey finds a natural tempo for each movement and shapes Farrenc’s cantabile melodies with a graceful flexibility. Lean-toned strings, violins properly divided left and right, make for ideally clear tutti textures. Both slow movements have a chaste beauty, with specially eloquent playing from first oboe, clarinet and horn. These are among the earliest symphonies, if not the earliest, by any female composer. Yet when you listen to them Farrenc’s sex is irrelevant. This is music whose inventiveness and melodic fecundity can stand comparison with virtually any mid-19th-century symphony, and Equilbey and her forces prove ideal, committed advocates.