page_title: Nadia Boulanger
section_title: Touring and recording
hierarchical_section_title: Nadia Boulanger / Biography / Touring and recording
caption_attribution_description: English: Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) on board a transatlantic steamer in 1937.
context_page_description: Juliette Nadia Boulanger was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. She is notable for having taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century. She also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist.
  From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Conservatoire de Paris but, believing that she had no particular talent as a composer, she gave up writing music and became a teacher. In that capacity, she influenced generations of young composers, especially those from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Among her students were those who became leading composers, soloists, arrangers, and conductors, including Grażyna Bacewicz, Daniel Barenboim, İdil Biret, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Quincy Jones, Michel Legrand, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Darius Milhaud, Astor Piazzolla, Lalo Schifrin, Virgil Thomson.
context_section_description: In 1936, Boulanger substituted for Alfred Cortot in some of his piano masterclasses, coaching the students in Mozart's keyboard works. Later in the year, she traveled to London to broadcast her lecture-recitals for the BBC, as well as to conduct works including Schütz, Fauré and Lennox Berkeley. Noted as the first woman to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra, she received acclaim for her performances.
  Boulanger's long-held passion for Monteverdi culminated in her recording six discs of madrigals for HMV in 1937. This brought his music to a new, wider audience. Not all reviewers approved her use of modern instruments.
  When Hindemith published his The Craft of Musical Composition, Boulanger asked him for permission to translate the text into French, and to add her own comments. Hindemith never responded to her offer. After he fled from Nazi Germany to the United States, they did not discuss the matter further.
  Late in 1937, Boulanger returned to Britain to broadcast for the BBC and hold her popular lecture-recitals. In November, she became the first woman to conduct a complete concert of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London, which included Fauré's Requiem and Monteverdi's Amor (Lamento della ninfa). Describing her concerts, Mangeot wrote,
  She never uses a dynamic level louder than mezzo-forte and she takes pleasure in veiled, murmuring sonorities, from which she nevertheless obtains great power of expression. She arranges her dynamic levels so as never to have need of fortissimo ...
  In 1938, Boulanger returned to the US for a longer tour. She had arranged to give a series of lectures at Radcliffe, Harvard, Wellesley and the Longy School of Music, and to broadcast for NBC. During this tour, she became the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In her three months there, she gave over a hundred lecture-recitals, recitals and concerts These included the world premiere of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto.  At that time she was seen by American sculptor Katharine Lane Weems who recorded in her diary, "Her voice is surprisingly deep. She is quite slim with an excellent figure and fine features, Her skin is delicate, her hair graying slightly, she wears pince-nez and gesticulates as she becomes excited talking about music."
  HMV issued two additional Boulanger records in 1938: the Piano Concerto in D by Jean Françaix, which she conducted; and the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, in which she and Dinu Lipatti were the duo pianists with a vocal ensemble, and (again with Lipatti) a selection of the Brahms Waltzes, Op. 39 for piano four hands.
  During Boulanger's tour of America the following year, she became the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. She gave 102 lectures in 118 days across the US.
caption: Boulanger with Igor Stravinsky
exif: {}