L'album classique de janvier 2016

The quintet CD has been awarded to January's classical album in 2016 by Radio France.

Discover the January 2016 classical CD - fipradio

Radio France - Fip - Découvrir - L'album classique du mois - Royal Stockholm Philharmonic "Sonates Elégie Trio"

”Le Quintette à vent de l’Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Stockholm publie un album hommage au compositeur néoclassique Francis Poulenc enregistré à l'occasion du cinquantenaire de son décès.”

On this CD the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Wind Quintet and pianist Bengt Forsberg perform Sonatas, Elegy and Trio for Piano and Wind instruments by Francis Poulenc. The album was recorded in 2013 on occasion of the 50th anniversary of Poulenc's death, January 30, 1963.

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Recorded in the Main Hall of the Stockholm Concert Hall

Produced by Patrik Håkansson Mediaproduktion

Cover and graphic design Danny Gordon

Thanks to the Philharmonic friends who funded this disc.

FRANCIS POULENC (1899–1963)

Sonata for flute and piano (1957)

(à la mémoire de Madame Sprague Coolidge)

1. Allegro malincolico

2. Cantilena: Assez lent

3. Presto giocoso

Sonata for oboe and piano (1962)

(à la mémoire de Serge Prokofieff)

4. Elégie: Paisiblement, Sans presser

5. Scherzo: Très animé

6. Déploration: Très calme

Elegy for horn and piano (1957)

(à la mémoire de Dennis Brain)

7. Élégie: Très calme

Sonata for clarinet and piano (1962)

(à la mémoire de Arthur Honegger)

8. Allegro tristamente: Allegretto - Très calme - Tempo allegretto

9. Romanza: Très calme

10. Allegro con fuoco: Très animé

Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano (1926)

(à Manuel de Falla)

11. Lent. Presto. Le double plus lent. Presto

12. Andante con moto

13. Rondo: Très vif

Trois novelettes (1928)

14. Nr 1 C-dur (à Virginie Liénard): Modéré sans lenteur

Quinze improvisations (1959)

15. Nr 13 a-moll: Allegretto comodo

16. Nr 15 c-moll (hommage à Edith Piaf): Très vite

Trois mouvements perpétuels (1918/rev. 1939 & 1962)

(à Valentine Hugo)

17. I. Assez modéré

18. II. Très modéré

19. III. Alerte

The decorative finish in Francis Poulenc’s music gives a quick inroad into his work, but also perhaps something that leaves its more profound elements overlooked. Indeed, many people actually disregarded Poulenc’s seriousness owing to the seductive techniques of the light touch and to how the bourgeoisness of his childhood home seemed to lie like a sleek coating of varnish over the music. He was a brilliant composer, who waxed religious as the years passed, but a boldly exploratory musician like his colleague Olivier Messiaen he was not (1908–92). 

On the other hand, Poulenc reveals a uniquely personal dialect inspired by the neoclassicism that he had heard from the likes of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), and that, to some extent at least, was formulated by the French composer cardre Les Six as a reaction to the open expressiveness of romanticism and then the soft fogs of impressionism.

His personal idiom, with its vibrant rhythms and lively phrasings, ironic glances and richly sonorous harmonies, has made his vocal work and chamber music some of the most important compositions of the 1900s. During an incredibly tumultuous century, Poulenc occupies a place as one of the finest of tunesmiths. He once said of his own work: “I know perfectly well that I’m not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations like Igor (Stravinsky), Ravel, or Debussy, but I think there’s room for “new" music which doesn’t mind using other people’s chords. Wasn’t that the case with Mozart-Schubert?”

 

The three sonatas that he wrote for wind instrument and piano showcase all the characteristic charm of his music. They are mature works composed during the final years of his life. The sonata for flute and piano was the first of these three, and was dedicated to the American patron of the arts, Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge. The work was commissioned by the Coolidge foundation in her memory, and was originally conceived for a festival in 1956. Although Poulenc was fully occupied with his magnificent Dialogues des Carmélites, which was due to premiere at La Scala in Milan in January 1957, he accepted the offer on the next prompting from the USA. 

Poulenc himself sat at the piano when flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal gave the work’s premiere performance. Rampal talks about the background to the event in his autobiography. He recalls how Poulenc had phoned him and said: “Jean-Pierre, you know you’ve always wanted me to write a sonata for flute and piano? Well, I’m going to. And the best thing is that the Americans will pay for it!” The flute sonata, which he wrote in Cannes in the winter of 1956-57, is one of Poulenc’s more Debussy-esque works, as can be heard in the first movement, while it also channels traces of the Dialogues. While it is a “simple but subtle piece”, as Poulenc described it, it also contains many of the distinguishing marks that transcend the individual example: the light, often entertainingly melodic turns, distinct beat and immediate rhythms of Mozart and an all-over traditional, somewhat jazz-toned harmonic with a framework-piercing piquancy. 

The clarinet and oboe-piano sonatas are two of the very last works that Poulenc wrote, and it is often said that the latter’s final, sorrowful movement – Déploration (Lament) – was the last of them all. Poulenc died of a heart attack on 30 January 1963, leaving the clarinet sonata barely completed.

Behind the oboe sonata’s ostensible simplicity lie tremendous upper-register challenges for the soloist – their indiscernibility and unobtrusiveness being arguably one of Poulenc’s characteristic traits. The peacefully elegant oboe sonata is dedicated to the memory of Sergei Prokofiev. To the average listener without any particular insight into the mysteries of the oboe, the music might seem simple, but in actual fact it requires great technical acumen with its alternately strong and weak nuances in the lower register and delicacy of play in a sensitively high register.

Prokofiev. The Russian composer was a source of inspiration to Poulenc, as his sextet also testifies. In the oboe sonata, this influence is heard primarily in the scherzo, both in the piano part and in the thematic nod to the finale of Prokofiev’s flute sonata. 

The sonata for clarinet and piano is dedicated to the memory of a geographically and socially even closer colleague: Arthur Honegger. Poulenc and Honegger were two-sixths of the French composer group Les Six; they were of the same generation and shared a vision of putting impressionism and late romanticism to rest, but in spite of this were stylistically worlds apart.

The work was commissioned by American jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, who was meant to give its premiere performance with Poulenc himself at the piano. However, Poulenc died two months before the occasion, so it was Leonard Bernstein who took the stool at the grand piano in Carnegie Hall in New York on 10 April 1963. It is the gently lyrical second movement that crystallizes out of the sonata’s core, imbedded between the more disjointed, short-breathed first movement and the lazy spurt of the finale.

The trio for piano, oboe and bassoon came at a time when Poulenc was still finding his way, and gravitated consciously towards a neoclassic ideal. It was a painstaking, time-consuming search: “I quite like my Trio because it comes over clearly and is well balanced. For those who think I don’t care about form, I wouldn’t hesitate to reveal my secrets here: the first movement follows the plan of a Haydn allegro and the final rondo that of the scherzo from the second movement of Saint-Saëns’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.” It was actually Ravel who made those suggestions as Poulenc was composing the trio in Cannes in 1926.

However, the first sketches for the trio date from 1921, although it was not until five years later that the work was completed. During this time he had studied for Charles Koechlin in order to hone his skills. “I have worked hard on it,” he wrote to critic Paul Collaer in the autumn of 1924, “and it is in a style that is at once new for me and yet very Poulenc-esque.”

In the trio, which was Poulenc’s first major chamber work, he plays with the French baroque emphasis on simplicity and clarity. It is traditionally three-movement in form with a graceful Mozartian andante movement in the middle and is marked by elegant symmetries and humoristic whims. It is dedicated to the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, whom Poulenc met at the home of his teacher Ricardo Viñes in 1918.

Poulenc composed his first two novelettes – the title alluding to short, almost trivial little stories – during the years follow the trio, which had taken so long to finish. The first, in C major, was written in 1927 and embodies a kind of naivist clarity and simplicity. It is dedicated to Virginie Liénard, an old family friend.

Also presented here are two movements from Quinze improvisations, one of Poulenc’s personal favourites for piano. This is a collection of fifteen quasi-improvised pieces created over almost three decades, between 1932 and 1959. Although, of course, not improvisational in a literal sense, the music is some of Poulenc’s most electrifying and inspired. The nostalgic no. 13 is the most charming of the series, while the last, no. 15, pays homage to singer Edith Piaf. The picture that Poulenc paints of this Parisian icon is a powerful one, especially in his allusions to the line “c’est une chanson qui nous ressemble” (It is a song like us) from the song “Les feuilles mortes” (also known as Autumn Leaves). 

The final work of this selection, Trois mouvements perpétuels (three perpetual motions) was written in Paris in December 1918. Poulenc referred to the movements as ultra easy, “like a brisk stroll along the Seine”. It had only been a year since his public debut as a composer with a work dedicated to Erik Satie (Rapsodie nègre); his earlier attempts at composition from 1914 he had destroyed.  

It was through Stravinsky that he came into contact with music publishers, and Trois mouvements perpétuels proved an immediate hit amongst pianists and audiences alike. The fact that the work, with its small, carefree wanderings over the keyboard was written just a month after the end of the First World War, might seem symptomatic of this time. Incidentally, the “perpetual” of the title refers to the way that each movement ends harmonically unresolved, as if leading us ever onward. The work is dedicated to artist and illustrator Valentine Hugo.

Text: Tony Lundman, Stockholm Concert Hall ©

English translation: Neil Betteridge