Stéphane Denève accompanying Laurence Kilsby in Lil Boulanger’s Vieille prière bouddhique.
Via Twitter.

Always enthralled by French music, at the Proms earlier this week (following the Orchestre de Paris playing Berlioz, Debussy, and Stravinsky) I went to hear Stéphane Denève conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a programme of Lili Boulanger, Fauré, and Ravel, with vocal solos by Golda Schultz, Laurence Kilsby, and Jacques Imbrailo (listen on BBC Radio 3).

Despite her sadly short life, the music of Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) has grown in reputation—her name now ranking alongside that of her sister, the influential pedagogue Nadia. The concert opened with Lili’s Pie Jesu, dictated on her deathbed to Nadia (whose 1968 recording with Bernadette Greevy and the BBC Symphony Orchestra can be heard here).

Boulanger was a pupil of Fauré, and her Pie Jesu made an apt bridge to his Requiem, at whose heart is a setting of the same text. The Requiem is so over-exposed that it deserves to be heard with fresh ears. A subjective comment: whereas for some works like the Brahms German Requiem I can overrride my youthful experience of accompanying amateur choral societies, in this case I still can’t fully engage, even if I can now appreciate Fauré’s originality.

More from both composers after the interval: Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande, a popular theme for composers of the day—notably Debussy, Schoenberg, and Sibelius. Then came Lili Boulanger’s Vieille prière bouddhique, with tenor and choir * singing a text translated from Pali—a “prière quotidienne pour tout l’univers” whose goal is as distant now as it was in 1917. Dominated by a somewhat portentous tritone interval, it adds to our list of fin-de-siècle orientalism.

Léon Bakst, costume design for Tamara Karsavina as Chloé, 1912. Source. 

Just predating both the Boulanger pieces, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé (see my main page on Ravel) is exquisite. Ideally it should be heard in the complete version, but the 2nd suite makes a popular concert finale (here it was enhanced by wordless choir, usually considered too extravagant). The opening is always enchanting—I like this story (anyone have an original source?):

Ravel, when asked how it was that his famous musical evocation of sunrise had been penned by someone who never got up before 10.30am, replied, reasonably enough, “I used my imagination”.

To follow the flute solos of Pelléas and the Prière, Daphnis and Chloé is a glorious showcase for the woodwind, with Stéphane Denève at last free to conduct with balletic nuance and bacchanal abandon.

A most exquisite passage—from 5.43 in S-Simon Rattle’s live performance with the LSO here.

* The late lamented Nicolas Robertson was part of the Monteverdi Choir for John Eliot Gardiner’s 1999 recording, inspiring him to create one of his most moving anagram tales—192 anagrams of Lili Boulanger that he wove into yet another fantastical plot (the title Nubile gorilla an anagram that vies with Gran visits York for Igor Stravinsky!).