Piano Concertos Poulenc Aubade Louis Lortie piano Hélène Mercier piano BBC Philharmonic Edward Gardner Lebrecht Music & Arts Photo Library Francis Poulenc, early 1920s Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963) Concerto, S 146 (1949)† 20:00 for Piano and Orchestra 1 I Allegretto – Più mosso (très allant) – Ancora più mosso – Subito largo – Reprendre subitement le tempo initial – A tempo più mosso (très gai) – Subito Allegro molto 10:00 2 II Andante con moto (Commencer très calmement) – Subito più mosso (tempo exact de l’Allegretto) – [Céder un peu] – Plus calme – A tempo [I] 5:57 3 III Rondeau à la française. Presto giocoso 3:56 3 Aubade, S 51 (1929)† 19:31 Concerto chorégraphique for Piano and Eighteen Instruments Au Vicomte et à la Vicomtesse de Noailles 4 Toccata. Lento e pesante – Molto animato – Animer – 2:35 5 Récitatif. Les compagnes de Diane. Larghetto – Céder un peu – 1:42 6 Rondeau. Diane et compagnes. Allegro – Entrée de Diane. Più mosso – Sortie de Diane. Céder un peu – Sans ralentir – Céder à peine – 3:11 7 Presto. Toilette de Diane. Presto – Sans ralentir – 1:24 8 Récitatif. Introduction à la Variation de Diane. Larghetto – Librement – Presser – Céder – 2:09 9 Andante. Variation de Diane. Andante con moto – Animer – Animer encore – Emporté – Reprendre brusquement le Tempo I – Allegro feroce. Désespoir de Diane – 3:33 10 Conclusion. Adieux et départ de Diane. Adagio – Più mosso 4:54 4 Concerto, S 61 (1932)*† 19:06 in D minor • in d-Moll • en ré mineur for Two Pianos and Orchestra À Madame la Princesse Edmond de Polignac 11 I Allegro ma non troppo – [Plus vite] – Gai – Le double plus lent – Subito Tempo I – Le double plus lent – Le double plus lent 8:02 12 II Larghetto – Plus allant – Tempo I 5:19 13 III Finale. Allegro molto – Agité – Plus calme 5:36 Sonata, S 8 (1918, revised 1939)* 5:57 for Piano Four Hands À Mademoiselle Simone Tilliard 14 I Prélude. Modéré – [ ] – Tempo I – Presto, strident 2:02 15 II Rustique. Naïf et lent 1:56 16 III Final. Très vite – Presto – Tempo I – Presto 1:53 17 Élégie (en accords alternés), S 175 (1959)* 5:20 for Two Pianos À la mémoire de Marie-Blanche Très calme et mélancolique – En animant peu à peu (capriccioso) – Animer – Tempo I (exactement) 5 18 L’Embarquement pour Cythère, S 150 (1951)* 2:02 Valse-musette for Two Pianos À Henri Lavorelle cette évocation des bords de la Marne chers à mon enfance Très amicalement Francis Poulenc Octobre 51 Très vite et gai TT 72:44 Louis Lortie piano Hélène Mercier piano* BBC Philharmonic† Yuri Torchinsky leader Edward Gardner† 6 Poulenc: Concertos and other Works for Piano Sonata for Piano Duet Marie Antoinette, playing at being a shepherd. The French use the phrase ‘tuer le père’ for The finale is more dissonant, and a powerful the act that all young artists must perform climax reintroduces the opening chords in order to find their own voice – to kill, or from the first movement... but triple piano. at least turn their back on, their greatest Throughout, Poulenc keeps us guessing at authority figure. So it was that the nineteen- what will come next, and the final chord is no year-old Poulenc, in writing his Sonata for exception. piano duet (1918, revised 1939), turned his back on works such as the suites Dolly Aubade (Fauré, 1894 – 96) or Ma Mère l’oye (Ravel, As the 1920s progressed, Poulenc came to 1908 – 10), and instead launched out on an be heard as something of a clown – partly exercise in what one can only call ‘the new true but, as in the case of many clowns, barbarism’, following the lead of Bartók and, he was at heart an unquiet soul. Some of more especially, the early piano pieces of his anxiety came from acknowledging a Prokofiev. Also somewhere in the mix were lack of technique, an inability to make his the African sculptures that would become music grow logically and inevitably to a all the rage among Picasso and others in the Beethovenian or Brahmsian climax. The years immediately after the First World War. solution was simply to walk round the But after the savage blast of the opening, problem instead of fighting his way through the ‘Prélude’ soon turns to the Poulenc who, it, and to accept himself as he was. In the in Ravel’s admiring words, ‘invented his own ‘choreographic concerto’ Aubade (1929) he folk tunes’, and the movement is essentially abandoned himself to his ‘plaisir’, but also built on the contrast between passages to his innate anxiety, as he told the story of of ‘charme’ and those that are ‘féroce’ and how the huntress Diana, surrounded by her ‘strident’. The second movement, marked maidens, is discovered at dawn, burning with Naïf, obeys this instruction in being written a love that the gods forbid; and how, for all entirely on the white notes – Poulenc as her companions’ attempts to comfort her, 7 she remains inconsolable and finally rushes a marrow, a strong centre. The Concerto for off into the forest to find solitude, ‘carrying two pianos was commissioned in the spring the bow that was as tedious to her as my of 1932 by the Princess Edmond de Polignac, piano was at that time to me’ – for Poulenc who had heard both men play at her salon wrote Aubade during one of his frequent and was herself enough of a musician to periods of depression. The sour angularities recognise a meeting of two minds and two and deliberately gauche two-part writing techniques. She also knew the dilatory side of the opening warn of what would come in of Poulenc well enough to offer him the Dialogues des carmélites (1953 – 56) and chance of a performance that September La Voix humaine (1958). But there is sunlight at the Venice Festival. He worked with too, and tunes that melt the heart; Diana, unexampled speed through the summer, and after all, is in love... the first performance in Venice was a great success that helped both Février’s career Concerto for Two Pianos as a pianist and his own as a composer – as Concertos in general have been public he wrote to a friend afterwards, tongue not music, at least since the days when Mozart entirely in cheek, wrote them for himself to play and to earn you will see that it is an enormous advance an income. But the concertos by Poulenc over my earlier works, and that I am truly were mostly generated by private motives: entering my great period. commissioned by friends, written for friends Perhaps his most impressive technical or for his own entertainment. One friend was feat was to impose unity of tone on to the Jacques Février, born in the same year as myriad disparate elements in the Concerto, Poulenc (1899) and, like him, a piano pupil including the contemplative gamelan sounds of Ricardo Viñes, the Spaniard who gave at the end of the first movement, recalling so many first performances of works by the Balinese music he had heard at the 1931 Debussy and Ravel. Poulenc and Février were Paris Exposition coloniale. From there we leap both large men with large hands (Février was to Mozart, although the music of this second Ravel’s favourite interpreter of the Concerto movement for left hand) and they played well together, quickly veers, at the entrance of the their piano tone what the French conductor second piano, towards a style that was Manuel Rosenthal called ‘moelleux’ – having standard for me at this period. 8 One of the delights of this movement is In the end, he decided to duck the the sense we get of the music gradually challenge altogether. Instead he wrote losing its grip on the eighteenth century what he called ‘a light concerto, a kind of and sliding (helplessly?) forward in time. souvenir of Paris for a pianist-composer’. By the end, the two styles have become The Paris in question would not be the posh integrated, so that the movement seems Paris of the Opéra, let alone the intellectual truly timeless. The last movement is a riot of Paris of Montparnasse, but the seedier Paris tunefulness, prodigal almost to a fault. Here of Maurice Chevalier and of the suburbs. the textures approximate most nearly to He referred to the concerto as being ‘en traditional nineteenth-century patterns, until casquette’ – we might say a ‘flat cap a decidedly uncontemplative version of the concerto’. He finished it in October 1949, gamelan music rounds things off. telling Bernac that it could best be defined as being Piano Concerto raked like [a] terrace. The orchestration is In a world in which composers, or their agents, very precise and varied, the piano writing spend much time and energy telling us how brilliant and suited to my capabilities. wonderful their music is, it is refreshing to The fifty-year-old composer admitted read Poulenc on his solo piano music: with a that going back to the style of your twenties few exceptions, notably his Improvisations, it could present a problem, and this was even comes out covered in red – derivative, lacking more the case at the start of a decade when in atmosphere, formally limp. He was somewhat Boulez and his young serialist colleagues kinder to his three works for piano and were making the running. Over half a century orchestra recorded here. The first two indeed later, it is easier to see the concerto’s virtues: had been among his greatest successes, so, memorable tunes (especially the wonderful, when Charles Munch asked Poulenc to write lyrical melody on violins at the start of the a solo concerto for the American tour he was slow movement), sparkling orchestration, undertaking with the singer Pierre Bernac in and a piano part that covers a wide range 1950, he no doubt felt he might have something of textures, from the simple octaves at the to live up to.