Three neoclassical symphonies

Simone Menezes: Music by Prokofiev, Villa-Lobos & Poulenc

The up-and-coming Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes has matched three symphonic works in an album about neoclassicism, one of the most interesting and important components of the modernist revolution in the music of the first half of twentieth century. As a musical lens neoclassicism offered a new way to look at the past, sharpening and bringing into focus at times, distorting at others. But more important is what it illuminates about the modern world and the composers that lived in it.

The revolution of the new, modern music of Stravinsky, Debussy & Ravel was just as frightening as the fractured visual arts ushered in by Picasso & Braque. It's no wonder that in 1917 both Sergei Prokofiev and Heitor Villa-Lobos should throw a lifeline back to 18th century Vienna to help keep their bearings as they wrote their music of the future. Prokofiev's model was Haydn's symphonies, while Villa-Lobos looked to Mozart's operatic music. The former created a masterwork in his "Classical" Symphony, while Villa's First Sinfonietta, "In Memory of Mozart" has made much less of a stir in the century since. It's a nice little piece, a clever piece, which shows how quickly the Brazilian composer could pick up an entirely new musical vocabulary thousands of miles away from its Parisian epicentre. Villa-Lobos spent years playing the cello in the pit of the Rio de Janeiro opera house, and his Sinfonietta is a deconstruction of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and the Magic Flute. But Villa had a different European forebear; his true personal voice didn't emerge until he came to terms with the music of Bach.

Simone Menezes has been pondering the similarities between the Classical Symphony and the Sinfonietta #1 for quite a while. Here's a video from back in 2018 where she explains how similar the two works are, though one was written in Rio, the other in St. Petersburg/Petrograd:

The Sinfonietta of Francis Poulenc, meanwhile, was written thirty years later, in 1947. A decade younger than Villa-Lobos & Prokofiev, Poulenc was actually more closely aligned with the musical avant garde, writing modernist works beginning in the late 1910s. As the post-WWII era began, his own neoclassical symphony adds a second layer of looking back: to the 18th century Viennese masters, but also to the younger Poulenc himself, writing such works as the Concert champêtre for harpsichord & orchestra in 1928. His Sinfonietta is suffused with nostalgia, but unsentimental in nature. Earlier I called neoclassicism a lens; in this work Poulenc is using it as a kaleidoscope. Scenes shift, and the ostensibly trivial work becomes a sophisticated compendium of earlier times. As Simone Menezes says in her excellent liner note essay, "... the work transcends its apparent lightness, approaching a symphonic dimension not through development, but through accumulation and contrast."

This recording is greater than the sum of its three parts; each symphonic work is enhanced by its relationship with the others, and the place of each in musical history makes listening as instructive as it is enjoyable.

The cover design is by Jimena Estíbaliz.