Excerpts from the booklet:
The musical world has reason to be grateful to one Winnaretta Singer, better known by her married name of Princesse Edmond de Polignac. A personal fortune derived from her father's famous sewing machine business, and her marriage to a French nobleman (after a girlhood spent in fashionable London and Parisian society), saw her well placed to cultivate and nurture the finest artistic talents of Europe, particularly musical ones. After her husband's premature death, she commanded the most respected of Parisian salons, opened her Venice mansion to all manner of musicians, and lavishly bestowed cash and commissions on the likes of Debussy, Falla, Stravinsky, Faure and Ravel.
Inevitably, Francis Poulenc came into the orbit of the Princesse, and it was at her home that he first met the pioneer harpsichordist Wanda Landowska - an encounter which resulted in his harpsichord concerto, the Concert champetre (1927-28), an exploration of incisive, brilliantly clear keyboard style. The Princesse then commissioned Poulenc to write the Concerto for two pianos, which he composed at Le Tremblay in the summer of 1932. The highly successful premiere was given in Venice in September that year, with Poulenc and his friend Jacques Fevrier taking the solo parts.
The crystalline writing perfected in the Concert champetre served Poulenc well in the new concerto, which is infact a hugely entertaining divertissement. The work is a typical cocktail of all that seemed gay and good to Poulenc at the time, mixed and tossed back and forth betwen the two pianists: a base of brash Neo-classicism, a sprinkling of black-and-white movie romance, a dash of end-of-the-pier melodrama, the whole thing topped with frothy good humour. There are some unexpected moments of ethereal hypnotic calm - inspired, it is said, by the sound of the Balinese gamelan, which Poulenc had heard at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition. Mozart takes a brief bow in the concerto's second movement, and the whirl of the concerto's conclusion soon sweeps everything else before it.
Some years after the composition of the Double Concerto, Poulenc, on vacation near Rocamadour, learned of the death of a friend in a motor accident. This news, coupled with a visit to the sultry, craggy heights of St Amadour (a simple chapel carved into the rocks), restored Poulenc's Christian faith, which had lapsed since early manhood.
The Rocamadour experience resulted directly in the composition of, amongst others, motets, a Mass, a Stabat Mater and a Gloria, in which a sincere religious devotion co-existed alongside the old, quicksilver Poulenc. "There is in Poulenc", Claude Rostand was prompted to write, "a bit of a monk and a bit of a rebel". In spirit, the Gloria belongs to the very human, innocent and even sentimental genre of Catholic art exemplified by the popular version of the life of St Francis of Assisi and his camaraderie with the world of nature. There is no evidence of painful soul-searching; the mood is tender, charming and the music full of graceful French inflections which lighten the familiar Latin text, touchingly expressing the private side of Poulenc.
While choral music was the obvious vessel to carry this new devoutness, the Concerto for organ, strings and timpani (1938), again commissioned by the Princesse, was also considered by Poulenc to be "sacred" rather than "secular", albeit standing "on the fringe of my religious music". Poulenc made a serious study of the organ's possibilities before embarking on the work, and consulted Maurice Durufle on the registrations. This single-movement concerto establishes a fine balance between thunderous Neo-baroque magnificence (reminiscent of Bach's G minor Fantasia), wistful meditation and fairgound playfulness.
By 1949 the Princesse was dead, but Poulenc found in the Boston Symphony Orchestra a commissioner for his Piano Concerto, which was first performed by the composer himself in January 1950, under Charles Munch. If Poulenc "the monk" pervades the Organ Concerto, it is Poulenc "the rebel" who returns triumphantly to bestow a final wave in this, the composer's best concertante work. Again, the music is kaleidoscopic, constructed in a montage-like, almost cinematographic style of effervescent mood chagnes and dazzling imagery. Moments of calculated seriousness (such as the quasi-Mahlerian dream world of the second movement's opening) give way readily to passages of glitzy humour and high spirits, and again to rhetorical, brassy gestures which pay homage to the imagined medievalism of Poulenc's old mentor, Satie. His commissioner, too, is not forgotten: the concluding Rondeau a la francaise suddenly goes to the negro spiritual Way Down Upon the Swanee River.
Like that of his beloved Debussy, the career of Poulenc was framed by the composition of chamber works, although Poulenc curiously favored the more incisive sound of wind instruments and piano while Debussy almost exclusively used strings with or without piano. Poulenc himself confessed a dislike of writing for solo strings, discarding several attempts to produce works for violin, though finally producing sonatas for both violin and cello. The sharp wit and brittle glitter of much of his music was ideally suited to the "outdoor", penetrating voices of blown instruments.
The Sextet (1932-39) is Poulenc's major chamber work from a period in which he concentrated on piano and song composition. The piano provides a perfect foil to the acid timbres of the winds, and the work as a whole is a Neo-classical frolic in which profundity marries perfectly with frivolity.
The Sonata for two pianos was written in 1952-53 for the duo-pianists Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale. Broadly speaking, the material can be classified into two main strands: slow, solemn, invariably 3/4, and somewhat mystical; and faster, with constant semiquaver accompaniment, basically 4/4 but much varied, and unmistakably urban. Once this distinction is made, the structure of the entire work becomes clear. Throughout, Poulenc uses a style which makes few demands on the listener, and it is chiefly his intuitive sense of underlying unity in superficially diverse material that at once baffles the critic and makes the piece worth hearing again and again.
(Copyright DECCA 1996)
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