How good now and again to escape the highways for discoveries like these—especially in the case of Lili Boulanger (younger sister of the eminent Nadia), who after making history at 19 as the first woman ever to win the Prix de Rome, so tragically died of tuberculosis in 1918, still only 24. Of the four works for mixed choir, soloists and piano included here, the atmospheric Soir sur la plaine was in fact written for that competition's first round. All four reveal an arrestingly imaginative response to verbal imagery as well as an acute ear for sensuously beautiful sound—not least in Les sirenes. It's clear (as Dr Joachim Draheim's exceptionally thorough booklet-notes remind us) that Debussy's influence was strong. Yet that she was already finding her own distinctive voice is nowhere more apparent than in the four solo songs, particularly the last she ever wrote, the searching Dans l'immense tristesse.
As for Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, nothing more testifies to the composer she might have become (in her case but for marriage) than the ambitious eight-part setting of her husband's poem, Nachtreigen, in fact composed, at 24, in the year of her wedding. The four-part settings of her Gartenlieder cycle have a wholly disarming, innocent charm—with just one (''Abendlich schon rauscht der Wald'') that sounds a more introspective note. It was no doubt Robert's enthusiasm for his newly-formed mixed choir in Dresden that prompted the 28-year-old Clara Schumann's three unaccompanied four-part Geibel settings in 1848. As they've only very recently been published, I was delighted to find them on disc so soon. A neater little craftswoman than Clara it would be hard to name. But there are some surprise turnings, too, once afloat on the Venetian waters of No. 3.
I have nothing but praise for the fresh-toned and malleable young singers of the Heidelberg Madrigal Choir. And with Hartmut Holl as her vividly evocative scene-painter, Mitsuko Shirai sustains the Boulanger solo songs with an exquisitely moulded line and a voice now so sensuously enriched in the mezzo register as well as fearlessly able to scale the high-lying chmaxes of the two Maeterlinck settings, Attente and Reflets. Just once or twice in the Boulanger part-songs I wondered if texture was ever so slightly blurred by the piano's right pedal, or else by microphones too closely picking up its overtones. But for the most part I enjoyed the disc's tone-quality because so natural.'