Lili Boulanger: Hymne Au Soleil, Choral Works – Antonii Baryshevskyi

   in Choir & Organ (Sep, 2018)
Lili Boulanger died on 15 March 1918, weakened by chronic pulmonary problems and Crohn’s disease. Claude Debussy died ten days later, but he was 56 to her 25. He was also male, self-evidently, and somewhere in that collision of facts and contrasts is the reason why we know little of Lili beyond a certain legend of beautiful suffering and the passionate but partisan advocacy of her formidable sister Nadia. But what a composer the younger sister was! She recognised the vocation in her teens and applied herself to a body of work that ranges between the youthfully affirmative tones of Renouveau, the shadow-side melancholy of Sous-bois and the startlingly beautiful Hymne …