Boulanger: La Ville Morte album review – bringing the famous master’s opera to life | classical music

nAdia Boulanger (1887-1979) is now best remembered as a hugely influential teacher, spreading the gospel of neoclassicism across several generations of composers on both sides of the Atlantic. She was also a conductor and organist, and early in her career, at least, had ambitions as a composer in her own right, which she largely abandoned in the early 1920s a few years after the deaths of both her immensely talented younger sister Lily, and her mentor, the pianist and composer Raoul Pugno.

In collaboration with Pugno Boulanger composed La Ville Morte, an opera in four acts based on a play by Gabriele D’Annunzio. It was scheduled to premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1914, but was canceled after the outbreak of World War I. The opera survives only through the score, and for this first-ever recording, taken from performances in New York last year, it was minimally orchestrated for a group of 11 players. The “dead city” of La Ville Morte’s title is Mycenae, and the intertwined story of love, lust and ambition between a quartet of archaeologists takes place among the city’s ruins. Musically, the film nods to Wagner, Fauré and, most of all, early Debussy, but the work never convinces in any of those modes, running out of dramatic steam long before the short final act, despite the best efforts of conductor Neil Goren and his hard-working crew of four.