Ulster Hall, Belfast Tonight 7.45pm Adm free 0044-3709011227
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983) and Amy Beach (1867-1944) are the composers featured in this Friday’s free BBC invitation concert with the Ulster Orchestra.
The most famous musical Boulanger is the long-lived Nadia (1887-1979), who was one of the most celebrated composition teachers of the 20th century. Her pupils included such distinguished Americans as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Quincy Jones and Philip Glass. But Nadia believed her younger sister to be the greater talent, and gave up composition shortly after Lili’s death.
Lili was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome (in 1913) and a range of eminent musicians (including Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Igor Markevitch and Yan Pascal Tortelier) have taken up the cause of this major talent whose life's work was cut so tragically short. Concert performances of her work are still something of a rarity, although the RTÉ NSO did performer her prize-winning cantata, Faust et Hélène, in Dublin in 2005.
The Ulster Orchestra’s programme under JoAnn Falletta (pictured above) offers two works from the last year of Boulanger’s life, D’Un Soir Triste and D’Un Matin de Printemps. They are coupled with Germaine Tailleferre’s 1928 Concertino for Harp (soloist Catrin Finch), and the Gaelic Symphony that Amy Beach wrote in 1896.
