New York Times
November 2026

A French composer obsessed with the saxophone, Decruck wrote dazzling music. Decades later, her work is getting a second hearing. Listen for yourself.

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

The first thing you hear in Fernande Decruck’s music may surprise you: a saxophone, singing. In her 1943 “Sonata in C-Sharp Minor,” for example, the instrument moves through yearning melodies, angular turns and changing shades of sound. She believed the saxophone could be intimate and immense, as breathy as a human voice one moment and bright enough to cut through an orchestra the next.

Decruck was a composer of notable variety who could convincingly hop between styles, while synthesizing those elements into a cogent musical dialect.

“You always know that a piece is by her,” the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani said in a phone interview. “She has quite an individual voice.”

Esfahani contributed to a 2025 album of Decruck’s works in the concertante style — a genre for soloist and orchestra where the two forces are more integrated than in a concerto. It was the second such album recorded by the Jackson Symphony Orchestra of Michigan as part of a multivolume effort by the conductor Matthew Aubin to resurface her forgotten catalog.

The album opens with Decruck’s swirling cello concerto, of long, passionate, highly melodic solo lines; its initially bombastic accompaniment obscures an enduring sense of melancholy. It continues with “Les Trianons” for harpsichord and orchestra, which offers a combination of stateliness and wistfulness. In multiple movements, named after two buildings at the Palace of Versailles, Decruck enlivens the neo-Baroque stylings with unusual timbres — such as the celesta, a small twinkling keyboard instrument most associated with the “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” from “The Nutcracker.”