Yet another fine addition to BBC Radio 3’s coverage of female composers: the great Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) (immortalized on the excellent T-shirt)—click here, part of a website well worth exploring.

Dying terribly young, Lili was eclipsed by her equally brilliant older sister Nadia (1887–1979), herself one of the great influences on WAM music-making in modern times (see here, and for a festival in 2021, here). And of course I’ve written many posts on French music in the form of Ravel and Messiaen.

“Not a lot of people know this”, but I recorded Lili’s pieces (or even morceaux) for violin and piano with Susan Tomes on one of those disc thingies around 1974, while we were at Cambridge. Here’s a 1930 recording of the Nocturne with Nadia accompanying Yvonne Astruc:

Even in our Cambridge days, At A Time When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular, we were all much taken by Du fond de l’abîme:

Note Nick Robertson’s magnificent anagram fantasy on Lili Boulanger, Nubile gorilla. And for my own fantasy on Nadia’s pupils, click here. See also French music at the Proms.