The delights of total immersion in the music of two sisters
Lili and Nadia Boulanger
Barbican
The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s terrific Total Immersion series aims to bring little-known modern composers out of obscurity, by mounting a day-long celebration of concerts, films and talks. The latest instalment focused on the two neglected composing sisters Nadia (1887-1979) and Lili Boulanger (18931918), stars of the Parisian musical firmament in that heady era when Picasso and the Ballets Russes were making artistic history.
As the decades passed, though, they faded into the margins. Nadia became a terrifyingly demanding composition teacher, with a roll-call of students that included Aaron Copland and Astor Piazzolla. Lili, the younger of the two, is now better known as a tragic symbol of talent cut short than as a composer. She died, probably from Crohn’s disease, aged only 24.
It was Nadia’s compositions that provided the big surprise of the day. She was an ardent disciple of the cool neoclassical school led by Stravinsky, but her own music was anything but chilly. In her Three Songs, sung in the lunchtime chamber concert by Guildhall School student Michael Daub with nice sensitivity to the French verse, we were wafted into a sad world of melancholy sunsets and jealous lovers. Later, in the main evening concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, pianist
Alexandra Dariescu summoned a gripping blend of grandiloquence and clarity in Fantaisie variée.
But the music’s strangely ham-fisted orchestration and the generic darkly swirling romanticism, as if Gabriel Fauré had been crossed with Rachmaninov, never really caught fire. Nadia, always the acutest judge of other people’s music, declared her own to be “useless”, and it was hard to disagree.
Her sister Lili’s music was in an altogether different class, as the day proved. For one thing, she had a stunning orchestral imagination, shown by innumerable subtle touches in the evening concert, such as the choirs of high plaintive winds over incandescent horns in the Old Buddhist Prayer. It created a mysterious thrill that was more than conventional exoticism.
For another, she had a far greater emotional range. It extended all the way from the grandeur of the Theme and Variations, played with a nicely dank, Gothic grandeur by Elizabeth Pion, to the perfumed lightness of From a Spring Morning, performed with delicious dancing grace by violinist Maria Włoszczowska, cellist Leo Popplewell and pianist Gary Beecher.
The Debussy-ish moments in that piece only confirmed that, like all the best composers, Lili Boulanger had the courage to flaunt her creative debts, because she knew her music was strong enough to surmount them. That was evident above all in her stupendous setting of Psalm 130. Here the intertwined duetting of mezzosoprano Katarina Dalayman and tenor James Way, and the blazing tone of the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra under James Gaffigan, combined to create something overwhelmingly rich and grand. Hear the BBC Symphony Orchestra concert on May 8 at 7.30pm on BBC Radio 3, and for 30 days thereafter via the Radio 3 website