The name of the remarkable teacher and conductor Nadia Boulanger is famous throughout the musical world, but her sister Lili (six years younger), phenomenally gifted – she was the first woman to win the Premier Prix de Rome (while Nadia had attained only a Second Prix) – showed promise of at least equal distinction. Always of delicate health, her death at the early age of 24 was a tragedy for music. Apart from works written in her early teens, which she later destroyed, her composing career lasted a mere seven years; but the quality of these compositions from that time is arresting. In 1992 EMI reissued some old recordings of some of them, unfortunately in indifferent performances and shallow sound, and without supplying texts for the vocal works; so the present disc, which triumphantly reverses these drawbacks, is all the more welcome.
Except for parts of D’un matin du printemps (originally for violin and piano, and orchestrated only two months before her death), a grave, even sombre air permeates her works, which are heavily tinged with modal thinking. Her idiom is strong, with a bold harmonic sense and an individual feeling for scoring (her stirring Psalm 24, for example, has the unusual combination of brass, timpani, harp and organ with the male voices): the beatific ending of Psalm 129 is heart-easing after the earlier harshness of ‘Hard as they have harried me, they have not overcome me’ (words significantly applicable to her own determined spirit). Her choral works are comparable to the best of Roussel or Honegger, but her Psalm 130 (dedicated to her father’s memory), with its exotic scale and chromaticisms, has more affinity with Bloch and is, without much doubt, a masterpiece. A disc not to be missed.'