Boulanger

We are around the time of the Regency, at the political crossroads between Louis XIV and Louis XV. The viola da gamba was enjoying its last hours of glory in France, while the violin was beginning to take centre stage. The Golden Hour, which generally refers to the periods after sunrise and before sunset when the light changes, evokes here those years of convergence, even confrontation, between a viola da gamba in the twilight of its life and a violin at the dawn of its soloist destiny.

Friedrich Cerha’s output has solid roots in an extended musical tradition, while spanning a wide arc from the beginnings of new music all the way to the present. This is not only due to the composer’s respectable age, but primarily to the great number of activities he has pursued in the course of his long life, along with the great variety of influences he has incorporated into his work.

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.

When choosing the material to be recorded, I first became interested in the production of Lili Boulanger and quite by chance, around the same time, I received a hot tip from my colleague Niina Ranna about the relatively unknown Czech composer, Vítězslava Kaprálová. This turned out to be a lucky coincidence, because after getting to know the output of both, my attention was drawn to how the expressive tonal language of the two composers seemed to communicate with each other. Little by little, it started to become clear how much they actually had in common.

On "Wanderlust," the new album on Berlin Classics, the Boulanger Trio explores romantic worlds of feeling, transports listeners to a wide variety of soundscapes, and takes hold of the musical walking stick. With a program that explores through different national schools of composition, they not only combine the great names of the 19th century on one album, but deliver an intelligently assembled soundtrack for a road trip. Founded in Hamburg in 2006 by Karla Haltenwanger (piano), Birgit Erz (violin) and Ilona Kindt (violoncello), the trio is now based in Berlin and Hamburg. In 2007 the ensemble won the 4th Trondheim International Chamber Music Competition in Norway, followed by the Rauhe Prize for Modern Chamber Music in 2008. The ensemble has received musical guidance from Hatto Beyerle, Menahem Pressler and Alfred Brendel.

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 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.

Art song had blossomed into a multifaceted genre by 1800, and the debate whether to favour recurrent stanza structures or through-composed form was well underway. Lieder, as the lyrical genre per se, marked out the territory in which musicians could express the most profound emotions. The best composers therefore increasingly chose to through-compose their songs – a logical step, thanks to which they were able to closely follow the content and the speech of the poems they were setting to music. Beethoven already took that very step in his earliest Lieder.

Destined to be musicians? The female composers to whom Baroque violinist Sophie de Bardonnèche pays tribute enjoyed very different fates: while the name Élisabeth 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 Opéra and nicknamed ‘la Légende’ in her time? Her opera-ballet, Les Génies, remains a testament to her great mastery.

While Marin Marais is best known for his works for viola da gamba, he also composed for the flute; Michael Lynn's recent rediscovery of manuscripts containing pieces for flute and basso continuo as well as duets caught the attention of Francois Lazarevitch and Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, who now present the first recordings of these works.