Fernande Decruck
American conductor Matthew Aubin is now widely recognized as the leading specialist on the work of French composer Fernande Breilh-Decruck (1896–1954). He has received several research grants to deepen his study of her life and still largely overlooked body of work.
A committed advocate for the recognition of women in music history, Aubin is dedicated to bringing Fernande Decruck’s forgotten — and recently rediscovered — music back to life. He has produced several critical editions of her works, published by Éditions Billaudot, and has programmed many of her compositions in the United States and abroad.
In 2022, he recorded a first album of her orchestral works with the Jackson Symphony Orchestra (Claves Records), offering orchestras renewed access to the rich and distinctive musical world of Fernande Decruck.
In 2025, Matthew Aubin released a second album with Claves Records, marking a new milestone in this rediscovery. The recording features, among other works, the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra — a highly expressive piece that had remained unpublished for decades. This recording project further affirms his commitment to showcasing the full scope and depth of Decruck’s orchestral writing.
Matthew Aubin also offers several concert programs centered around Fernande Decruck’s orchestral music.
Complete program on request
Although the name of French composer Fernande Decruck, born on Christmas Day into a family whose father, Ferdinand Breilh, was a merchant in Gaillac, Tarn, is unfamiliar to many music lovers, it is, however, familiar to those who play the saxophone, an instrument for which this composer with a rich catalog wrote a large number of scores. From the age of eight, the young girl learned the piano in Toulouse before entering the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris. In 1922, she studied the organ with Eugène Gigout; appointed assistant professor of harmony, she would contribute to the training of Olivier Messiaen. Becoming an organ professor in 1926, she was introduced to improvisation by Marcel Dupré. She was found in New York in 1928 for a concert tour. In the meantime, she married the saxophonist Maurice Decruck (1892-1966), who was also a double bass player and was hired for this position by the New York Philharmonic, then conducted by Arturo Toscanini. This stay of several years in the USA was interrupted by an accident to Maurice Decruck’s hand, which forced him to become a music publisher in Paris; he published a series of his wife’s scores and notably contributed to launching Edith Piaf’s career.
While her husband was living in the capital, Fernande Decruck settled with her three children in Toulouse, where she taught. She moved to Paris in the early 1940s, separated from her husband, but played in concert halls by conductors such as Paul Paray and Jean Fournet. Having become a professor at Fontainebleau, where she was organist at the Saint-Louis church, she divorced in 1950. Financial worries would overshadow the end of her life, accompanied by increasingly failing health, which saw her die of a stroke at the age of 57. Fernande Decruck left behind a rich catalogue: works for piano and organ, chamber music, symphonic and concert music, vocal music, and around fifteen film scores, particularly from the silent film era. She is not a forgotten artist on the record scene: there are albums dedicated to her saxophone pieces on the labels Daphanéo, NoMadMusic (the Ellipsos Quartet), Fidelio, MSR Classics and Saxophone Classics. (…)
Jean Lacroix, Crescendo
Matthew Aubin, Conductor
The 2022-23 season marks Matthew Aubin’s first year as Music Director of the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra. He also serves as Music Director of the Jackson Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Director of the Chelsea Symphony in New York City.
In his role at TCS, he has led notable collaborations with partners such as actor John Lithgow, the award-winning television series Mozart in the Jungle, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Matthew Aubin played a leading role in launching and developing the Chelsea Symphony Orchestra’s annual competition for emerging composers, with high-profile adjudicators including Conductor Laureate of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Music Director of the All-Star Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz.
Matthew Aubin conducted the TCS in its Lincoln Center debut and has conducted the New York premieres of works by Mark O’Connor, Fazil Say, and Caroline Shaw, among others.
