One week of only woman musicians (that'll show'em....)
Nadia Boulanger. The greatest music teacher of.... ever? Her pupils are the who's who of American and French music. Among them: Copland, Barenboim, Blackwood, Gardiner, Glass, Lipatti, Markevitch, Piazzola, Walker, and Quincy Jones.
Her younger sister, Lili Boulanger, may well have been the greatest composer of the 20th century had she lived past 24. What she managed is just about the most tantalizing musical fragment we have of young talent never allowed its development. Nadia did not compose to nearly the same extent, but she did teach it, and teach it as apparently none other.
It's a shame she didn't conduct more but... y'know...
So here's her conducting the most monumental piece of her teacher allergic to monuments: the Faure Requiem. Real musicmaking lead by a woman who musicked as we breathe.
Marguerite Long, pianist of choice for Ravel, Faure, Milhaud, and eventually Debussy; playing one of my favorite pieces of music in the world. This is, I think, her second recording. She recorded it virtually right after its premiere in 1932, conducted by Ravel himself, but Ravel was never much of a conductor and was soon to die. His conducting and the inept recorded sound makes it a not particularly fun listen. This, from when Long was nearly 80, is so much much better in spite of old age's slight infirmities. It's certainly one of the slower performances and threatens in all sorts of places to get slower yet, but who can possibly measure up to this inner atmosphere? The whole thing sounds conjured from a dream. There are jazzier recordings, more sarcastic ones, and certainly much more virtuoso ones, but there has never been one that sounded so much like immersing yourself in the world of dreams. It is certainly the most beautiful, poignant, moving recording of which I know of this piece that stands alongside maybe two others at the zenith of Ravel's already miraculous output. Never have we been so aware that Ravel was perfectly capable of drawing from those same spiritual, healing waters that one gets from more obviously humane composers like Faure and Schubert.
Lili Boulanger. There isn't much biography so to speak about the 20th century's greatest compositional talent. Anything one can say would speak more about her family than her - the fact that she was the daughter of a Russian princesss who absconded with a French musician 40 years her senior; the fact that she was Nadia's sister... Her life did not have much time to achieve much story of her own, except that she learned six instruments and could sing, she won the Prix de Rome at 19 for a 30 minute cantata about Faust which she wrote in 4 weeks, and that she dictated a Pie Jesu to Nadia from her deathbed - the literal scene which Amadeus imagined of Mozart dictating to Salieri happened with Lili and her sister. If a biopic were made about her life, it would have to be more about Nadia.
France does not have any truly dominant composers the way Germany has Beethoven and Bach, but five more years and Lili may well have been it - outachieving Faure, Bizet, Ravel, Berlioz, Couperin et al to be the most consequential French composer since Machaut invented discovered four voice polyphony and counterpoint in the 1300s. As a composer of Psalms, I particularly appreciate her Psalm settings. These texts can die on the page before they reach the ear. When you're setting an enormous amount of text, you're beholden to it and have to find ways of keeping music interesting that's set to text that is just another go-round of 'The bread of god is breeeeeeeeaaaaaad.' So much French repertoire, even in the 19th-20th centuries, revolves around liturgical music, and they have so little compunction about bringing Wagnerian drama and eros to sacred repertoire. Whereas the Victorian oratorios of Elgar and Bruch have a Mendelssohnian approach that places limitations on how 'dangerous' this music can get, there is no limit here. If you don't speak French, you could just as easily imagine this as the music of Venus and Adonis. However little there is, it's high time Lili Boulanger is standard repertoire. Had she lived, the entire history of the world would have been different.
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