Poulenc: Complete Music for Wind Instruments and Piano

From notes by Ned Rorem

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 three-movement 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 B-flat 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 Poulenc's filching of Stravinsky' s famous "Petrouchka sound"-a pair of clarinets in rapid close har- mony-more sinful than Stravinsky's never- mentioned 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 onata 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 bird-call, lime-twig, or pipe. Pipe, mean- while, seems to be a three-hole pipple-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 Marie-Laure who gave it to me in 1951. The crumbling title page is bespeckled with every- one'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 play 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 Veyron- Lacroix. (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 Veyron-Lacroishe 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 beecause 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 same- ness 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 to Poulenc.

TRACK LISTING

Sextet for Wind Quintet and Piano, FP 100 (1932-1939)

1 I. Allegro vivace 07:42

2 II. Divertissement Andantino 04:29

3 III. Finale: Prestissimo 05:46

Leonard Amer, Oboe

Robert Routch, Horn

Gervase de Peyer, Clarinet

Loren Glickman, Bassoon

Paula Robison, Flute

Charles Wadsworth, Piano

Sonata For Two Clarinets, FP 7 (1918, rev. 1945)

4 I. Presto: Tres rythme 01:35

5 II. Andante: Tres lent 02:29

6 III. Vif: Vite avec joie 01:48

Gervase de Peyer, Peter Simenauer, Clarinets

Sonata For Clarinet and Piano, FP 184 (1962)

7 1. Allegro tristamente 04:42

8 2. Romanza - Tres calme 04:46

9 3. Allegro con fuoco 03:02

Gervase de Peyer, Clarinet

Charles Wadsworth, Piano

Sonata for Clarinet and Bassoon, FP 32a (1922) 

10 1. Allegro - Tres rythme 01:41

11 2. Romance - Andante tres doux 03:00

12 3. Finale - Tres anime 02:46

Gervase de Peyer, Clarinet

Loren Glickman, Bassoon

13 Villanelle, FP 74 (1934) 01:39

Paula Robison, Piccolo

Charles Wadsworth, Piano

Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano, FP 43 (1926)

14 1. Presto 05:36

15 2. Andante con moto 04:11

16 3. Rondo: Tres vif 02:59

Leonard Amer, Oboe

Loren Glickman, Bassoon

Charles Wadsworth, Piano

Sonata for Flute and Piano, FP 164 (1956)

17 1. Allegro malinconico 04:36

18 2. Cantilena - Assez lent 04:14

19 3. Presto giocoso 03:37

Paula Robison, Flute

Charles Wadsworth, Piano

20 Elegie for Horn and Piano, FP 168 (1957) 10:18

Robert Routch, Horn

Charles Wadsworth, Piano

Sonata for Oboe and Piano, FP 185 (1962)

21 1. Elegie - Paisiblement 05:23

22 2. Scherzo - Tres anime 04:05

23 3. Deploration - Tres calme 04:39

Leonard Amer, Oboe

Charles Wadsworth, Piano