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Le bal masqué, for baritone (or mezzo-soprano) & chamber ensemble, FP 60
1. Préambule et Air de bravoure 4:11
2. Intermède 3:05
3. Malvina 2:16
4. Bagatelle 2:13
5. La dame aveugle 2:37
6. Finale 4:38
Trio for oboe, bassoon & piano, FP 43
7. Lent-Presto 5:28
8. Andante con moto 3:57
9. Rondo: Trés vif 3:15
Le bestiaire (Cortège d'Orphée), song cycle for voice & piano (or chamber ensemble), FP 15a
10. Le Dromadaire 1:12
11. La Chèvre di Thibet 0:45
12. La Sauterelle 0:24
13. Le Dauphin 0:29
14. L'Ecrevisse 0:36
15. La Carpe 1:07
Sextet for wind quintet & piano in C major, FP 100
16. Allegro Vivace 7:54
17. Divertissement: Andantino 4:46
18. Prestissimo 5:39
Thomas Allen - Baritone (Vocal)
Nash Ensemble
Lionel Friend - Conductor
AMG:"Francis Poulenc was introduced at an early age into the Parisian cultural circles in which prominent figures like Cocteau and Satie moved, and his early compositions (that is, those that came before his religious awakening in the mid-1930s) reflect the decidedly effervescent aesthetic values that Poulenc and the other members of 'Les Six,' in response to the emotional viscosity and heavy handedness of the Austro-German musical establishment, came to represent. Among Poulenc's contributions to this early Parisian style was an approach to musical development and continuity that neither developed or continued: themes didn't grow out of each other organically, they appeared pell-mell, piled on top of each other, strung along with carnivalesque variety; harmonic progressions bypassed modulation in favor of bootlegger turns and chromatic acrobatics. Fittingly, Poulenc was very fond of the surreal, shape-changing images and incongruous plots that filled the poems of Max Jacob (1876 - 1944), and set many of them to music. Among these are the four poems appearing in Poulenc's 'Profane Cantata,' Le Bal Masqué (The Masked Ball).
The work came as the result of a commission from the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles to compose a work for a 1932 concert at the Théâtre de Hyères. The poems, taken from Jacob's 1921 anthology, Laboratoire central, held for Poulenc a kind of odd Bradbury-esque nostalgia, and many of Jacob's images evoked faint fragments of memories. The song cycle reaches our ears, too, as a grab bag of unsorted, mismatched textual and musical remembrances. Poulenc's score calls for a solo baritone (or mezzo), oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, piano, violin, cello, and percussion. This ensemble offers a broad timbral array, which allows the composer to be as playful with register and orchestration as he is with melody and harmony. His menagerie of melodies is passed from instrument to instrument, treating his clever lines with skillfully idiomatic charm and humor.
The cycle is structured in such a way that the four songs are separated by instrumental passages - either autonomous movements, such as the Interlude between the first and second songs, and the Bagatelle that separates the third and fourth; or extended instrumental prefaces, such as the Caprice that precedes the Finale, or, for that matter, the long introduction to the first song. The Preamble begins with an infectiously peppy romp, bringing to mind the Darwinian cocktail party from Milhaud's Création du Monde. The baritone enters, singing of a mysterious Madame la Dauphine, Chinese Peasants, and cannons made of goose fat. The most readily identifiable connections between this strange collection of observations are phonetic ones, which Poulenc makes abundantly clear through incessant repetition (Madame la Dauphine-fine-fine-fine-fine.... a peasant from Chine-chine-chine-chine... you get the idea). Elsewhere, the text is treated even more clownishly. A maudlin thirty-second note run introduces the overly-rhapsodic benediction that closes 'Malvina.' Worse yet, the closing lines of the last poem in the cycle - the singer, following the composer's instructions 'très violent' and 'exagérément articulé,' tries to achieve an ever-climactic conclusion, repeating the last words an inexcusable number of times; and just when we think he might be finished, he leaps saucily into his falsetto range for a delightfully ridiculous finish.
Poulenc eventually sobered up a bit, and in his middle years he composed a large body of rather reverent sacred works. Still, pieces like the 'Laudamus Te' from the Gloria, and the finale of his swansong, the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, demonstrate the youthful and invigorating wit of his earlier works.
During the 1920s Poulenc conscioiusly began to pursue a neo-Classical ideal, fashioning many of his works in the molds of Stravinsky and late Debussy. In his Trio for piano, oboe and bassoon - the composer's first true chamber work - he imitated the French Baroque style, with its emphasis on clarity, balance, simplicity and a generous dose of humor. In a letter to the critic Claude Rostand, Poulenc admitted that 'I love my Trio because it sounds clear and it is well balanced.'
The Trio, which is cast in a traditional three-movement form (Presto, Andante, and Rondo), is imbued with elegant symmetries throughout. As Poulenc acknowledged, the first movement rather self-consciously emulates a Haydn Allegro, while the Rondo draws from the Scherzo of Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No. 2. Yet a sly sense of humor is never far beneath the surface. Early in the first movement, the oboe and bassoon play a mocking variation on the military bugle call 'Taps,' as angular piano chords provide a jazzy foundation that suggests Duke Ellington. Later in the movement the oboe offers some lyric phrases while the piano retorts with more splashy, descending chordal figures. The Andante is Mozartian in character, while the Rondo is brisk and whimsical. If the piano dominates the Trio, Poulenc's love of wind sonorities is still present throughout, and the bassoon and oboe never become mere accompanying instruments.
Though Francis Poulenc's favored poet seems to have been Paul Eluard (the author of about three dozen of Poulenc's song texts), the composer also frequented the writings of Apollinaire; in fact, Edward Lockspeiser, writing in 1940, observed an important parallel between Apollinaire's poetic style and that of Poulenc and his French musical predecessors: '[Apollinaire] reveals a remarkably pure lyrical strain, derived from the music inherent in words.... Yet mated with this entrancing simplicity is a rasping sarcasm, a cynical despondency which French artists have again and again used as an antidote to any semblance of too obvious sentimentality. We find this combination in the music of Poulenc itself, as in the music of Chabrier, Satie, and Ravel.' Scholar and biographer Keith Daniel ventures further in comparing the two: 'On a deeper, more personal level, Poulenc found a kindred spirit in Apollinaire, a spirit of deep tenderness and biting humor, a modern spirit rooted in tradition; in a word, Poulenc and Apollinaire shared a temperament of contradictions.' Though Poulenc had read Apollinaire before, it was a live recitation by the poet in 1919 that inspired the composer to set his texts to music; the resulting song cycle, Le Bestiaire, stands as the first of several convergences between Apollinaire's poetry and Poulenc's music.
Though the cycle is most often heard today in its version for voice and piano, Poulenc's original scoring called for the singer to be accompanied by a flute, clarinet, bassoon, and string quartet. This perhaps explains the rather unpianistic nature of the accompaniment in the piano/vocal version. Elsewhere, Poulenc's approach to song seems to treat the singer's voice like the white froth discernable at the tip of a contiguous wave of sound; here, the piano must parse itself up to cover the roles of the various instruments. The result is a sonority that is occasionally unidiomatic, but sometimes endearingly so. One example can be found in the rhythmically dwindling bass and martial melody to which Don Pedro's fine quartet of camels saunters in 'Le Dromadaire,' which, when given over to the piano, seem to make the awkward and unwieldy beasts just a little more cartoonish. Likewise, the murky depths through which 'L'Écrevisse' ('The Crayfish') wanders are somewhat overly evoked by the constant 'tidal' shifts in mode and the unmoving bass drone.
This is not to say that Poulenc means to caricaturize Apollinaire's images. The musical exaggerations in 'Le Dromadaire,' for example, serve only to enhance and comment upon the air of odd ambition exhibited by the mysterious Don Pedro. In recalling his hearing the poet read his own poetry, Poulenc commented that 'Apollinaire's voice is like that of his works, melancholy and joyful at the same time. This is why my Apollinaire songs must be sung without emphasizing the ludicrousness of certain phrases. Le Bestiaire is a most serious work.'
Other songs in the cycle bear this out. The second, 'La Chèvre du Thibet,' compares a goat's soft coat to the golden fleece sought by Jason; this comparison is then rendered moot upon considering the tresses of the speaker's beloved. As the poem finds ultimate beauty in the simplest or smallest of ideas, so does the music draw comparison between grandeur and plainness: the globe-trotting adventurer Jason is reflected in the music by lush, flowery harmonies and figuration; the greater beauty, as embodied by the lover, is answered in the score by a simple, diatonic line. In passages such as this, Apollinaire and Poulenc demonstrate the complementarity of their styles, characterized by a mode of expression at once concise, precise, and profound.
The Sextet has earned a place in Poulenc's canon as one of his most popular works, and in the right interpretive hands the work exudes French wit as well as a degree of emotional depth. Poulenc wrote the three-movement work in 1932, scoring it for flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, horn, and piano; he revised it in 1939. The piece offers a mix of elegant, deceptively simple motives, rhythmic vitality, and playful harmonic turns in a virtuosic framework.
In three movements - Allegro Vivace, Divertissement, and Finale - the sextet lasts just over 15 minutes in performance. The first movement opens with a fast, toccata-like statement that is obviously indebted toStravinsky's neo-Classicism. The second movement, marked Andantino, begins with an oboe melody that is passed off to other instruments and developed before returning to the oboe at the conclusion. This symmetry is matched by a slow-fast-slow classical structure. The prestissimo Finale is a modified rondo in which rhythmic and lyrical sections are present in equal measure, with an intense conclusion. The Sextet was first performed in Paris in December 1940."
Le Bal Masqué/Le Bestiaire/Sextet or
Le Bal Masqué/Le Bestiaire/Sextet
