Lili Boulanger reviews
Works by L Boulanger
Orpheus Vokalensemble/Michael Alber; Antonii Baryshevskyi (Carus)
Boulanger Sisters: Clairières and Mélodies Double Review
Nicholas Phan (tenor), Myra Huang (piano) (Avie) and Cyrille Dubois (tenor), Tristan Raës (piano) (Aparte)
Lili Boulanger: Psalms 24 & 130; Faust et Hélène; D'un soir triste; D'un matin du printemps
In 1913, Lili Boulanger became the first woman to win the coveted Prix de Rome. She promised to be one of the great talents of her generation, but, having been prone to ill health her entire life, she died before reaching her 25th birthday. Her completed works display a precocious maturity providing a tantalising clue as to what might have been. Her psalm settings, two of which are included on this excellent disc, are Boulanger’s greatest achievement.
Lili Boulanger: Clairières dans le ciel; Les sirènes; Renouveau; Hymne au soleil
‘War in laces’ blasted a headline in 1913. The event was not a preparative for the Great War, but the award of France’s famous Prix de Rome to a woman, the 19-year-old Lili Boulanger. Five years later Boulanger was dead. After a childhood spent in illness-induced isolation, this precocious talent expired, leaving an all too small corpus of works.
Lili Boulanger: Clairières dans le ciel
The exquisite beauty of Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel finds here two very fine advocates indeed. Zeger Vandersteene captures the vascillating mood wonderfully and Levente Kende is a poetic partner. A pity, then, that their recital is so short. Christopher Dingle
L Boulanger • Fauré
Recordings of neglected works are like buses. You wait for ages, then three or four turn up at once. To make matters even more frustrating, each conductor offers something special. Two marvellous discs centred on choral works by Lili Boulanger have already arrived in the past year, conducted by Mark Stringer (Timpani) and Yan Pascal Tortelier (Chandos) respectively, and John Eliot Gardiner can be seen on the horizon with his coupling of the psalm settings and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms on DG.
Strauss, Lili Boulanger, Rachmaninoff
Nadia Boulanger felt that her younger sister Lili, who died from TB at the age of 24, identified with the beloved heroine of a cycle of poems called Clairières dans le ciel (Clearings in the Sky) which she was given in 1913. She chose 13 verses by the Symbolist poet Francis Jammes to create a song cycle which, at 40 minutes, is Lili Boulanger’s longest extant work.
Lili Boulanger, Stravinsky
Lili Boulanger made history in 1913 by becoming the first woman to receive the Prix de Rome; she was just 19. And during her stay in Rome in 1916, a mere two years before her premature death, she divided her time between nursing war-injured musicians and writing three extraordinary Psalm settings.