Dip Your Ears: No. 285 (A World Premiere Recording of Nadia Boulanger’ Opera)

Nadia Boulanger La ville morte Neal Goren, Talea Ensemble Melissa Harvey, Laurie Rubin, Joshua Dennis, Jorell Williams (Pentatone 5187792, 2 CDs) US | UK | DE

Nadia Boulanger as a Composer

A delightful surprise for lovers of French Impressionism

There is an endless amount of unfamiliar repertoire to be discovered in classical music. Much of it forgettable, but some of it worth perking up for. This is very much a case of the latter. La ville morte is a four-act opera to a libretto by the would-be dictator and man of letters Gabriele D’Annunzio, with music by Raoul Pugno and Nadia Boulanger. Nadia, mind you. Born in 1887, later to enter music history as the most influential composition teacher of the twentieth century — and elder sister of the composer Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) who died at a tragically young age when Nadia was 31.

The Boulanger sisters’ story, told in shorthand, usually goes thus: Lili was so prodigiously gifted that Nadia, faced with this overwhelming talent, put her own compositional ambitions aside and devoted herself to teaching. And if there were still any questions early on, the younger sister’s premature death surely did the rest. No doubt family pressure also played a role — the father, just like Nadia, had won the prestigious Prix de Rome. But the decisive blow to the composing career may well have been the death of her teacher, mentor, musical collaborator, and lover, the (very much married) Raoul Pugno, who died in January of 1914 while the two were on concert tour together. Even then, things might still have turned out differently, had the outbreak of the First World War not forced the cancellation of the premiere of La ville morte. That finally took place only in 2005, in Siena.

Performances then (as now) were further complicated by the fact that the score itself was lost during the war. For the newly released world-premiere recording on Pentatone — produced in conjunction with a new staging at the Greek National Opera — conductor Nel Goren had to take matters into his own hands. He opted for a chamber-scale orchestration. He also cut a wordless chorus and a peripheral role to make future performances more feasible — in plain terms, cheaper. That decision is possibly lamentable (but if he had not told us, we would even know what we are missing) but in any case entirely defensible, and the result speaks for itself. The music, superbly played by the Talea Ensemble, can at times sound uncannily like Michael Nyman, or like Mahler seen through the prism of chamber music - a result of the minimal orchestration. It remains thoroughly compelling, though — with especially striking affinities to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. The singers, led by Melissa Harvey, add their share to the pleasure of this pleasing rediscovery.

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This review had been previously published on Classics Today.