FRANCIS POULENC 1899-1963
Sextet for Wind Quintet and Piano 0 (1932-1939)
[1] Allegro vivace
[2] Divertissement: Andantino
[3] Finale: Prestissimo
Leonard Arner, Oboe
Robert Routch, Horn
Gervase de Peyer, Clarinet
Loren Glickman, Bassoon
Paula Robison, Flute
Charles Wadsworth, Piano
Sonata for Two Clarinets (1918, rev.1945)
[4] Presto: Tres rythme
[5] Andante: Tres lent
[6] Vif: Vite avec joie
Gervase de Peyer, Peter Simenauer, Clarinets
Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1962)
[7] Allegro tristamente
[8] Romanza: Tres calme
[9] Allegro con fuoco
Gervase de Peyer, Clarinet
Charles Wadsworth, Piano
Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon (1922)
[10] Allegro: Tres rythme
[11] Romance: Andante tres doux
[12] Finale: Tres anime
Gervase de Peyer, Clarinet
Loren Glickman, Bassoon
[13] Villanelle (1934)
Paula Robison, Piccolo
Charles Wadsworth, Piano
EDITIONS:
TRACKS 1-6: Sextet: Wilhelm Hansen, Copenhagen
Sonata for Two Clarinets: J. & W. Chester Ltd., Eagle Court, London EC1, England/Ed. Wilhelm Hansen
TRACKS 7-13: Clarinet
Sonata: J. & W. Chester Ltd./Ed. Wilhelm Hansen
Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon: J. & W. Chester Ltd./Ed. Wilhelm Hansen
Villanelle: Pipeaux, 1934/Ed. L'Oiseau-Lyre.
Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano (1926)
[14] Presto
[15] Andante con moto
[16] Rondo: Tres vif
Leonard Arner, Oboe
Loren Glickman, Bassoon
Charles Wadsworth, Piano Sonata for Flute and Piano (1956)
[17] Allegro malinconico
[18] Cantilena: Assez lent
[19] Presto giocoso
Paula Robison, Flute
Charles Wadsworth, Piano
The
[20] Elegie for Horn and Piano (10-13) (1957)
Robert Routch, Horn
Charles Wadsworth, Piano Sonata for Oboe and Piano (1962)
[21] Elegie: Paisiblement
[22] Scherzo: Tres anime
[23] Deploration: Tres calme
Leonard Arner, Oboe
Charles Wadsworth, Piano
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
EDITIONS:
Trio: Wilhelm Hansen, Copenhagen
Flute Sonata: J. & W. Chester Ltd.
Elegie: J. & W. Chester Ltd./Ed. Wilhelm Hansen
Oboe Sonata: J. & W. Chester Ltd./Ed. Wilhelm Hansen
The pieces here are arranged in no consecutive order but rather according to how comfortably they fit onto a CD. Chronology is of no matter since the oeuvre doesn't grow; and the works, even their separate movements, can be flung kaleidoscopically across the decades and resettled with no esthetic damage done. The repertoire spans 44 years, from 1918 to 1962.
The game of spot-the-origin seems as valid a mode as any other for pinpointing the elan of a Poulenc piece. His three-movement Sextet, for piano and wind instruments (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn) starts with an upward sweep from Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto (as filtered through Stravinsky's Oedipus rex), then melts downward into Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto. The middle section, called Divertissement, sounds like a pastiche of Raymond Scott's pastiche of Mozart's Sonata K. 545 played "with a beat" and retitled From An Eighteenth Century Drawing Room. (The Sextet dates from 1932-1939, the period of Scott's trend of "Swinging the Classics," which Poulenc may well have been on to.) The Finale returns to the insolent tone of the beginning, and the whole, formally neat as a Haydn romp, reflects, as so many of Poulenc's threemovement works do, the giddy violence of a country fair where you lose your money in the morning, your heart in the afternoon, and regain them both in the evening beneath a shower of stars.
The little Sonata for Two Clarinets ( in Bflat and A) "comes out of the silence," wrote Cocteau, "and then returns to silence like a cuckoo in the clock." A cuckoo, yes, or a nightingale or a prophet bird. For what the piece owes to Stravinsky's Rossignol or Schumann's Vogel als Prophet is inestimable. The year was 1918, Poulenc was 19, and Petrouchka was eight. Yet was Pou!enc' s filching of Stravinsky's famous "Petrouchka sound" -- a pair of clarinets in rapid close harmony -- more sinful than Stravinsky's nevermentioned filching of that same device from Ravel's Prelude a la nuit?
Forty-four years later Poulenc penned the Clarinet Sonata, although to the ear of any musicologist it could have been a mere month later. Like Debussy at the end of his life Poulenc projected a series of six sonatas for diverse soloists, and like Debussy he lived to complete only three. Dedicated to the memory of Arthur Honegger, the first of Les Six to die, the Clarinet Sonata is the maitre's own swan song, nor at his death was there found any rough draft for works to come. The posthumous premiere is listed by Henri Hell as occurring in Carnegie Hall on April 10, 1963, and performed by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein (although Bernstein did not recall the event). The three movements are free in form, nondevelopmental, triste, clarinetistic, yet without virtuosity, almost childlike. The Prophet-Bird configuration from the Two-
-Clarinet Sonata reappears here (as well as in the Flute Sonata and the Oboe Sonata).
The eight-minute Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon (1922) is, in style and content, a twin of the two-clarinet piece-but a passive twin, duller in her frothy aims.
I find no data on the 1934 Villanelle pour pipeau et piano. The dictionary defines pipeau as birdcall, lime-twig, or pipe. Pipe, meanwhile, seems to be a three-hole fipple-flute. Anyway, this delicious sicilienne (here heard on a piccolo), lasting all of 90 seconds, can be played a cappella or with an optional and luscious piano background. The Villanelle echoes the plaintive folkloric calls, so appealing to all of Les Six, intoned in 6/8 by harvesters at close of day, a hundred miles away, a hundred years ago.
The Trio (piano, oboe, bassoon) is a work dear to my heart, not least because I own the original score. Francis Poulenc, who dedicated the piece to Manuel de Falla in 1926, gave the manuscript to a childhood love, Raymonde Linoissier, who, just before her early death, gave it back to the author who gave it to MarieLaure who gave it to me in 1951. The crumbling title page is bespeckled with everyone's faded handwriting. Perhaps one day I'll bequeath the previous pages to .... But it's too soon. The quality? I'm reminded of a character in an Albee who says, in a quip about love versus sex: "But
that was the jazz of a very special hotel, wasn't it?" The texture and dialect of absolutely all of Poulenc's music, whether it apotheosizes the Virgin Mary or the cop on the beat, is from a very special hotel in whose palm court his country-fair opera sound as in place as his sacred Gloria. The middle of the trio's three movements again uses Gluck's ballet music, very evocative among the dusky hallways.
Gluck haunts us too in the center of the Flute Sonata where he is joined by "Mother," a World War II ditty. This Sonata was concocted at the Majestic Hotel in Cannes between December of 1956 and March of 1957, and instantly entered the repertoire of Jean-Pierre Rampal and Robert VeyronLacroix. (Is this a tale told out of school: Poulenc found Rampal his ideal physical type, second only to our own Governor Thomas E. Dewey?) When I asked VeyronLacroix -- he of the brass digits, metronomic heartbeat, and heart-rending sense of clavecin manipulation -- how the new Sonata was, he replied, "Toujours la meme chose." And so it rather is.
But if none of these woodwind pieces are as touching as the songs and choruses, the Elegy for Horn and Piano is perhaps the most unusual, in that it's of a single souffle, yet vastly varied, and tries, vaguely yet ploddingly, for atonality. Composed in the autumn of 1957 to commemorate the death, in an auto crash,
of the British horn player Dennis Brain, it seeks to depict that very crash through a recurring feverish Stravinskyish figure interspersed by portentous unison statements of 12-tone rows. But the material is not mulled (certainly not in a Schoenbergian sense), and the melodies, though spacious and nostalgic and even gorgeous, are finally unsatisfactory by forever corralling the horn into its lower grumbling ranges.
If the Elegy is the most unusual, the Sonata for Oboe and Piano is, as such things can be judged, the "best" piece of the collection. Simultaneous with the Clarinet Sonata, and finished just weeks before Poulenc's demise, all the tricks of his trade are jelled into 13 moving minutes. Although dedicated to the memory of Prokofiev (how many of even Poulenc's gayest works are obituaries!), that composer is evoked less than Stravinsky's Sacre, peppered with quotes from Debussy's early Danse and Ravel's Nahandove. But the chief evocation is subliminal -- the pianist Jacques Fevrier, beloved of us all, who assisted at what the French call the creation of this piece. Now Jacques too is dead, as are most of the friends cited in this essay. With their deaths comes an altering of traditions on how music should or should not be composed and performed; prejudices and persuasions waver, become secondhand, third hand, and Poulenc settles into new perspective.
Hearing the woodwind catalog in one fell swoop forces me to realize that though each piece is foolproof, they're all the same. The sameness is stressed not because the language is ever unchanged (which it is, and so it was too with Chopin), but because there are no conversations, no argument, no strain. All players are in accord at all times. The two clarinets, the piano and oboe, the bassoon and horn, do not have separate personalities, they are clones nodding at each other. Is the sameness perhaps less trying in the vocal music where the tunes are quite simply more solid and contagious? Still, he never changed his tune throughout his life.
During the final years Poulenc often said that he wished he were 20 again so as to take Boulez on his own terms. But if Poulenc's serial forays -- C Major, pointillisms, he called them -were more laughable than, say, Stravinsky's, it could be argued that Webern was there for the asking for both men, long before Boulez was born. I truly do feel that with passing time, just as various creators of other centuries now appear homogenized to us as they did not to themselves, so Webern and Poulenc like distant stars will eventually merge. But the brightness will come from Poulenc.
-From notes by Ned Rorem
THE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY
OF LINCOLN CENTER
Cited by The New York Times as "one of the most treasured of New York's musical institutions," The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center was founded in 1969 as the resident ensemble of Alice Tully Hall. The Society's purpose is to present the rich chamber music literature, spanning the Renaissance to the present day, in performances of the highest caliber. Artists of the Society, all virtuosi in their own right, are the basis of the ensemble. The frequent inclusion of distinguished invited guest artists enables the group to perform works which range from duets to much larger instrumentations within a single program. Since its founding, the Society has commissioned over 80 new works, many of which have already taken their place in the permanent repertoire. The Chamber Music Society takes pride in continuing to serve as the model on which other organizations across the country have established themselves. In addition to its Alice Tully Hall series at Lincoln Center, the Chamber Music Society tours regularly in the U.S. and abroad. It is featured frequently on public television's "Live from Lincoln Center," and is heard nationwide on public radio. The Chamber Music Society has received national and international acclaim for its numerous recordings. The Poulenc recording project was initiated by the Founding Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society, Charles Wadsworth, who was associated with the composer while in Paris and frequently consulted with him on the interpretation of his works.
CHARLES WADSWORTH
is the Chamber Music Society's Founding Artistic Director. Considered the single most important force behind the surging popularity of chamber music in this country, Charles Wadsworth created the chamber music concerts of the Spoleto Festivals in Italy and Charleston, South Carolina. Artistic Director and Pianist of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from its inception in 1969 until the 1988-89 season, Mr. Wadsworth also performed as a guest of President Kennedy at the White House and has returned in concert for subsequent administrations. With the Society, he was responsible for the commissioning of 65 new chamber music works. In 1986, he won an Emmy for the Chamber Music Society's "Live from Lincoln Center" telecast, which he also hosted. Mr. Wadsworth was also the subject of a feature segment on ABC's "20/20" in a profile as both a performer and composer. France has honored Charles Wadsworth a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters, and Italy as a Cavaliere Officiale. Other awards include the Mayor's Award for Arts and Culture of the City of New York, and the first ASCAP Chamber Music Award for "adventurous programming of contemporary music."
Executive Producer: Dr. Frederick J. Bashour
Produced by Gregory K. Squires Produced in cooperation with the Minnesota Public Radio. Recorded at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, White Plains, New York, on March 15-17, 1983. Engineering & Digital Editing: Gregory K. Squires
