Concert & Tickets

Programme note

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
Flute Sonata (1957) [orch. Berkeley]

Allegretto malincolico
Cantilena - Assez lent
Presto giocoso

Poulenc always felt more at home writing for solo wind instruments than for strings. He appreciated them for what he regarded as their vocal qualities, echoing Stravinsky’s comment that they “breathe most attractively”. All but two of his published chamber works feature wind instruments.

He first drafted his Flute Sonata in 1952, possibly intending it for Julius Baker, then Principal Flautist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Other projects intervened, particularly the opera Les dialogues des Carmélites, and it was not until 1956 that he was able to return to it. Earlier that year he had received a request for a new chamber piece from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation which had been set up in 1925 by the great American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864-1953) to encourage composition and performance of chamber music. He first declined the invitation, then changed his mind and offered the sonata, which he completed in March 1957 and dedicated to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s memory. He gave the first performance with the French flautist Jean-Pierrre Rampal at the Strasbourg Festival that summer.

The first movement opens with a plaintively smiling theme for the flute heard three times, each repeat given a subtle new twist, and with a perky new idea for contrast. At the centre of the movement is a more expansively florid theme, before the opening theme returns once more.

The air of wistfulness is intensified in the slow movement. The music’s melodic character confirms the suggestion of the movement’s title, that it springs from the same impulse as the composer’s many songs.

The finale begins in a mood of knockabout fun: Poulenc never entirely lost touch with the iconoclastic impudence of the 1920s. But the energy gradually winds down to reveal the florid central theme from the first movement, with both the flute and piano part marked ‘mélancholique’. Momentum gradually returns, and with it the mood and theme of the opening. A hint that the first movement theme might follow in its turn is shrugged off with a final, almost defiant, flourish.

Berkeley made his orchestral transcription at the request of James Galway, and it was first performed in 1977. He was ideally suited to the task in many ways. Of the British composers of his generation he was the most obviously French in his musical sympathies. He was partly of French descent himself, and studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s; his long-standing friendship with Poulenc dates from this period. The skill with which he re-creates Poulenc’s essentially pianistic textures in orchestral terms makes this version a genuine alternative to the original.

© Mike Wheeler

Programme note

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)
Pavane, Op 50 (1887)

Gabriel Faure lived through a long and important period in French musical history. When he was born, Berlioz had not yet completed The Damnation of Faust. When he died, The Rite of Spring was already a decade old and Stravinsky had entered a fresh phase of his career. But if the milestones of European music appeared to pass him by  - and Debussy, we should remember, was born seventeen years after Faure but died six years before him - he was nevertheless a gloriously gifted composer who happened to be neither flamboyant nor progressive.  What he undoubtedly was, as one authority has put it, "musically sensitive and energetic."  He was one of the most inspired, as well as most private, figures of French romantic music.

He paid, alas, a price for his privacy, and for the very undemonstrative qualities that made him the composer he became. Though his Requiem is accepted as one of the greatest and least sensational works of its kind, and though Janet Baker championed his songs with a comprehensiveness that few other modern singers have brought to them, pianists seldom include his nocturnes and barcarolles in their programmes, and his chamber music, for all its beauty, remains an acquired taste. Yet it is in such poetic, inward-turning music that the essence of his style is to be found.

And the essence of that essence can be said above all to lie in the exquisite Pavane, one of the shortest and most popular of his works, whether performed in its purely orchestral version or as a choral piece - or, for that matter, as a ballet, in which form Diaghilev saw its possibilities. In whatever way it is done, it is all atmosphere. Like Ravel’s subsequent Pavane for a Dead Infanta, it progresses as a sad, subdued meditation on the ancient Anglo-French dance-form to which it owes its name.  Its strength - as well as its secret - lies in a sublime simplicity that wholly avoids sentimentality. Or, as Faure’s pupil Charles Koechlin remarked in a different context, it "mingles a hidden melancholy with a certain serenity."  Although, in the middle of the piece, things seem on the brink of flaring into something more passionate, the temptation is resisted and the slow, brooding, drooping, haunting pulse of the dance is restored.

© Conrad Wilson