Day 345
Nadia Boulanger: La Sirène
Soloists
Orchestra National Du Capitole De Toulouse
Leo Hussain
This took me a little by surprise. Nadia Boulanger is of course famous as a teacher of a several generations of composers. Thinking about the music that they wrote I had expected Boulanger’s music to be elegant and refined, with more than a hint of classicism. But this was anything but. It is an extended piece for soloists chorus and orchestra (not to be confused with her much shorter piece with piano accompaniment Les Sirénes) which was her entry for the Prix de Rome in 1908. She came second: the winner was the now completely forgotten André Gailhard. La Sirène is a no-holds barred full-blooded piece of post-Wagnerian French symbolism and clearly belongs to the same world as Debussy, Dukas and Chausson. It had some moments which were rather overheated, and the very end was perhaps a slight disappoint, but other that that I thought that it was a fine piece that did not deserve to fall into almost total neglect.
Nadia more or less gave up composition in order to teach. She was exceptionally self critical, remarking to Fauré ‘if there is one thing of which I am certain it is that I wrote useless music’. On that basis of this piece her normally impeccable judgement failed her when it came to her own music.
No comments:
Post a Comment