Boulanger

The 1910s were a period of extraordinary turbulence and change. Revolutions and war left monarchies and empires fallen and the social order irreversibly altered. The music on this album emerges from various points in that eventful decade, but all of it records vividly a world that was shortly to vanish forever – a world to which the year 1919 was already a coda.

Destined to be musicians? The female composers to whom Baroque violinist Sophie de Bardonneche pays tribute enjoyed very different fates: while the name Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665-1729) continued to be remembered, who knows Mlle Duval (born around 1718), the second woman to have a work presented at the Paris Opera and nicknamed 'la Legende' in her time? Her opera-ballet, Les Genies, remains a testament to her great mastery. Then there were Anne-Madeleine Guesdon de Presles and Elisabeth-Louise Pellecier, composers married to composers - the latter signed her works with the name of her husband, Papavoine… Others found it easier to achieve the limelight because they were aristocrats, like Mlle de Menetou (1679-1745). No fewer than ten female composers are brought back to life in this programme of sonatas, overtures and dances devised by Sophie de Bardonneche, a founder member of Le Consort, who is accompanied on her first solo album by her partners Lucile Boulanger and Justin Taylor.

“In Juon’s piano trio”, as the members of the Boulanger Trio find, “we plunge into the most profound recesses of the soul. Everything acquires existential significance. This work truly captivates us: so much occurs within such brief moments”. This is where our performers find a bridge that connects Juon’s kaleidoscopic tone poem with PETER TCHAIKOVSKY’s colossal Piano Trio, op. 50, a musical epitaph for pianist and conductor Nikolai Rubinstein, who had been Tchaikovsky’s friend and mentor.

In her debut recording for harmonia mundi, Lucile Boulanger explores the facets of Antoine Forqueray’s career as a virtuoso instrumentalist: adept in a wide range of Italian repertoire and skilled at transcribing works originally intended for the violin, he could try it on for size, as it were, before settling on a different medium. With the viola da gamba, he extended the technique of playing it far beyond the norm, confronting the performer with fiendishly difficult challenges… which have been met brilliantly by the hugely talented foursome heard here.

William Youn's first orchestral album for Sony Classical in cooperation with Deutschlandradio Berlin is dedicated entirely to the exuberant flair of fin-de-siècle Paris with rare repertoire by Reynaldo Hahn, Nadia Boulanger and Gabriel Fauré - a musical excursion into the salons of the Belle Époque full of dazzling rediscoveries.

In her own characteristic musical idiom, each of the four composers included in this recording has risen to the challenge of breaking through the limits of her time period, while not completely disavowing it. Indeed, authentic novelty in music does not always involve going beyond the confines of one’s epoch: it also means being at a crossing point, standing on the line that separates the old from the new, classical from contemporary, holding firm between two shores, in order to bring a shared resonance to what was, what is, and what will be.

In her own characteristic musical idiom, each of the four composers included in this recording has risen to the challenge of breaking through the limits of her time period, while not completely disavowing it. Indeed, authentic novelty in music does not always involve going beyond the confines of one’s epoch: it also means being at a crossing point, standing on the line that separates the old from the new, classical from contemporary, holding firm between two shores, in order to bring a shared resonance to what was, what is, and what will be.