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CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. 44 1 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. 1. Toréador - 20. iv. Une roulette couverte en tuiles .........[1.02] Chanson hispano-italienne [CM] .....[6.26] 21. v. À toutes brides ...........................................[0.41] 22. vi. Une herbe pauvre ...................................[1.40] Trois Poèmes de Louise Lalanne [FL] 23. vii. Je n’ai envie que de t’aimer ...............[0.54] 2. i. Le Présent ....................................................[0.54] 24. viii. Figure de force brûlante 3. ii. Chanson ......................................................[0.42] et farouche........................................................[1.29] 4. iii. Hier..............................................................[2.09] 25. ix. Nous avons fait la nuit ..........................[3.30] n his notorious little 1918 pamphlet Le Coq et l’Arlequin, Jean Cocteau pronounced Deux poèmes de 26. La tragique histoire du that ‘a composer always has too many notes on his keyboard.’This was a lesson the Guillaume Apollinaire [RM] petit René [JL] .............................................[1.29] young Francis Poulenc took to heart and observed throughout his career; and nowhere 5. i. Dans le jardin d’Anna.............................[3.06] I more tellingly than in the piano parts of his songs – far better written, he thought, than 27. Le petit garçon trop 6. ii. Allons plus vite.........................................[2.55] his works for piano solo. bien portant [LA].......................................[2.04] Trois chansons de Federico Garcia-Lorca [LA] Le travail du peintre [CM] After the First World War, the ethos of French art across the board lay in the direction of 7. i. L’enfant muet .............................................[1.41] 28. i. Pablo Picasso ................................................[2.32] clarity and simplicity. Cocteau further cried for ‘an end to clouds, waves, aquariums, water 8. ii. Adelina à la promenade ........................[0.48] 29. ii. Marc Chagall...............................................[1.12] nymphs, an end to fogs’, and Erik Satie, the cultural godfather of the new French music, 9. iii. Chanson de l’oranger sec....................[2.40] 30. iii. Georges Braque ........................................[1.34] warned that fogs had been the death of as many composers as sailors. Another target was 31. iv. Juan Gris.......................................................[2.11] the ‘music one listens to head in hands’ – Wagner most notably, but also Schumann. For 10. Paul et Virginie [CM]............................[1.09] Poulenc then, in quest of song texts, the nineteenth century was largely to be avoided and 32. v. Paul Klee .......................................................[0.47] only one of his texts, Théodore de Banville’s Pierrot, was published during it, while Jean 33. vi. Joan Miró ....................................................[1.43] 11. Nuage [LM] .................................................[2.24] Moréas’s four poems forming the Airs chantés were printed in the first decade of the twentieth. 34. vii. Jacques Villon ............................................[2.16] 12. Hymne [JL] ..................................................[4.01] Otherwise Poulenc sought either distancing through pre-Romantic poetry or immediacy 35. Les chemins de l’amour [FL] ............[3.52] through poetry of his own time. 13. Ce doux petit visage [LA]..................[1.53] Total timings: ..................................................[72.17] Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon [LA] In the present volume, only two of the song texts are historically distant. It has been said of the French that, the more revolutions they went through, the more they hankered after the 14. i. C......................................................................[2.55] Lorna Anderson [LA] certainties, real or imagined, of their past. The fifteenth-century poet Charles d’Orléans, 15. ii. Fêtes galantes.............................................[0.59] Jonathan Lemalu [JL] who provided three texts for Debussy songs, was captured by the English at the battle of 16. Priez pour paix [RM]...........................[2.41] Felicity Lott [FL] Agincourt in 1415 and kept a prisoner in the Tower of London for 25 years. His poem Priez Christopher Maltman [CM] pour paix therefore has personal resonance, and Poulenc’s setting, in the style of his recent Tel jour telle nuit [FL] Lisa Milne [LM] Litanies à la Vierge noire, is intimate in tone. Although he called it ‘a prayer at a shrine in time 17. i. Bonne journée...........................................[2.40] Robert Murray [RM] of war’, he wrote it on 29 September 1938; so it could more accurately be heard as a 18. ii. Une ruine coquille vide .......................[2.09] prophecy, casting reasonable doubt on the prospects of ‘peace in our time’. Hymne, written 19. iii. Le front comme un drapeau perdu ...[1.04] Malcolm Martineau piano in New York in November 1948, was written for the bass Doda Conrad, who was one of 3 23 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. singers in Nadia Boulanger’s famous Monteverdi recordings. Racine’s poem comes from a of his that Poulenc set in the autumn of 1943 see the war from two different perspectives. translation of the Roman breviary he made in 1680. Poulenc underlines its hymnic quality In ‘C’, where every line ends with the French sound of that letter, the composer reacts to by frequent doubling of the vocal line by the piano’s right hand. what he called the poem’s ‘extreme melancholy’, as the Germans overran France; in ‘Fêtes galantes’, to the picture of total disorder in which marquises are reduced to riding bicycles At the other extreme from these two religious offerings lie four examples of the ‘naughty’ – the title a bitterly ironical reference to the ordered life of eighteenth-century France as Poulenc – a side of him that for years had the unfortunate effect of deafening critics to his painted by Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher. more serious intentions. In Toréador, written in 1918 for a Cocteau music-hall evening, Poulenc deliberately mixes genres, producing ‘a Spanish/Italian song…that sends up the The notion of Poulenc as a facile composer died hard. In fact, he often thought about geography of the café concert songs of the time, in which a Japanese girl got bored in pieces for years before completing them, as with the song Paul et Virginie to a poem by Peking or Sappho fired questions at the Sphinx’.The prevailing waltz rhythm is decorated Raymond Radiguet, first attempted in 1920 but not given a final version until 1946.The with Spanish curlicues (notably on the word ‘Toréador’) and broken up at the end of each title refers to the idyllic novel of 1787 by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre that started the French of the three verses in a way that anticipates Poulenc’s later Surrealist style. rage for the exotic. Pierre Bernac says the singer should try to invest the opening line, ‘Ciel! Les colonies’ with the dreamlike atmosphere of ‘long voyages under sail, noble Jean-Marie Legrand, known also as Jaboune and as Jean Nohain, had been a fellow pupil savages, magic islands’. Poulenc, for his part, thought it would make a perfect encore piece. of Poulenc’s at the Lycée Condorcet and remembered the composer as no dunce, but He admitted that the three poems by Federico Garcia Lorca he was working on during simply uninterested in the scholarly curriculum. Since no printed edition of the verses is the summer of 1947 were giving him problems, and was never entirely happy with the known, we may assume they were written specially for Poulenc, who set them in 1934. result – not that composers are always the best judges of their own work! After the spare They are a perfect example of what he called ‘l’adorable mauvaise musique’, reminding us opening song, ‘Adelina à la promenade’ bursts in like a whirlwind. The final song is a of his remark that if he hadn’t been Poulenc, he would like to have been Maurice sarabande. Poulenc accused it of being ‘nobly French’ instead of ‘gravely Spanish’; but as Chevalier – a parallel further underlined by the waltz Les chemins de l’amour, which closes Bernac pointed out, Poulenc could never be anything other than French…He also took this recital in the same style as Toréador opens it. This ‘valse chantée’ formed the leitmotif his time over setting Laurence de Beylié’s poem ‘Nuage’: the poem was on his desk in of Anouilh’s play Léocadia, produced in Paris in November 1940, when it was sung by August 1955, but he didn’t finish setting it until September 1956. With its marking Yvonne Printemps, one of Poulenc’s favourite artists. ‘doucement mélancolique’, its shifting phrase lengths and vocal style somewhere between melody and recitative, it conforms to a Poulenc archetype. The composer joined the French army for just over six weeks in June 1940.After that, he remained in France throughout the war and, while never an active résistant, was in close He was adamant that the two formative poets for his song writing were Apollinaire and touch with clandestine groups that included poets such as Louis Aragon.The two poems Eluard. But once more, these