A New Dawn

There’s a burst of the bold and innovative in A New Dawn, a powerful collection of familiar and lesser-known works by Lili Boulanger, Joseph Bologne and Igor Stravinsky performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under conductor Jonathon Heyward, and featuring the star violinist Francesco Dego. By way of an overture, the LSO explores a literal dawn in the long-neglected 20th-century French composer Boulanger’s brief orchestral work D’un matin de printemps (“One Spring Morning”), a piece that plays with Debussy’s Impressionism while also dipping its foot in the emerging modernism of Stravinsky’s Russia. It was the last orchestral piece that Boulanger completed before her untimely death at just 24, in 1918, and conductor Jonathon Heyward believes a bright career was beckoning for her. “I think she would have been truly successful. Her clever way of orchestration allows for a flexibility in narration, which I think identifies her language.” Although just five minutes long, D’un matin de printemps conjures extraordinary atmospheres with its sense of drama and bold harmonic language, all brought to the fore in this arresting recording. There’s no doubt that the music of the 18th-century composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges is also enjoying its own new dawn. A fencer, horseman, violinist, conductor and composer, Bologne was a man of considerable talents. The son of a French plantation owner in Guadeloupe and his African slave, his music slipped largely into obscurity when he died in 1799. The Italian violinist Francesca Dego is one of a growing number of musicians discovering Bologne anew, and seeking to rehabilitate his work for a 21st-century audience. Dego’s performance of Bologne’s Violin Concerto in A major sits at the heart of A New Dawn. For Dego, Bologne’s music is a fairly recent discovery. “When first introduced to his music a few years ago I was shocked by the fact I had never even read about him before, considering he is clearly one of the great violin virtuosos of all time,” she comments. “Getting to know a composer you’re not familiar with is like meeting a new friend, which can feel a bit awkward at first, going through phases of curiosity, then building trust right to the moment you can finally smile and laugh together.” Bologne was a contemporary of Mozart, and the elegant, tuneful style the two shared makes comparisons between them inevitable. “Both composers are profoundly theatrical, both are inspired by the great Italian tradition, but in very personal ways and with distinct voices,” Dego says. “But whereas Mozart concentrates entirely on musical content, turning each instrument into the means to a perfect end, Bologne keeps a very firm grip on the showy aspect of violin-playing, making technical command a key to expression. In Bologne I feel like each note is gushing with the golden magnificence of the Baroque era, neatly stitched into the Apollonian perfection of Classicism.” Bologne was by all accounts a dazzling violinist, and liked showing off the technical tricks he could perform in his music. “The fast movements in the A major Concerto (the opening Allegro and final Rondeau) are nimble and wildly dangerous when they climb and jump up the fingerboard to unchartered heights,” Dego explains. “Bologne uses thirds, sixths and even tenths, every possible kind of scale and arpeggio, and intricate bow effects that are extremely rare in the music of his contemporaries.” While revelling in Bologne’s music, Dego is acutely aware that his life story has a darker side. At one point poised to lead the prestigious Paris Opera, he was rejected for the job when a clique of singers claimed that they could not take orders from him on account of his colour. This type of racial exclusion, Dego argues, played a major role in the neglect of Bologne’s output until relatively recently. “There is no doubt that a Black man of art and war, while tolerated and even found entertaining in his lifetime, would have been discarded at a point in history when slavery and racial discrimination were appallingly taken for granted.” Heyward and the orchestra take centre stage in the flamboyantly colourful Suite from Stravinsky’s The Firebird, a work which premiered in Paris when Boulanger was a teenager and which laid the foundations for a thrilling new musical era. Commissioned by Serge Diaghilev’s far-sighted company Ballets Russes, Stravinsky’s ballet borrowed stylistically from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, but took harmonic and rhythmic expression to a new level. Debussy delighted in the work’s “unusual combinations of rhythms” which were to find their way three years later in the groundbreaking The Rite of Spring. The Firebird has been recorded hundreds of times by almost every orchestra across the world, but Heyward eagerly embraces the opportunity to offer his own take on the music. “I do like to think that even a piece that’s so familiar can sound fresh and new under a different interpretation.”