Boisterous cheer and haunted longing

Francis Poulenc: Chamber music with piano

"What's nice with Poulenc," Erik Satie once said, "is that he makes up his own folklore." Everything about the composer was original: he was largely self-taught, but he had enough confidence in his own talent that his music went its own way. Not worrying too much about musical fashions, he often ended up leading the way himself. He was exposed from his teenage years to the musical revolution of Stravinsky's early ballets, and to the intellectual excitement of the surrealists, but Poulenc's music retained its own earthy, forceful personality, and never lost its way in glibness or sentimentality.

Here's Boris Lipnitzki's famous picture of Les Six with Jean Cocteau, from, I'm assuming, some time in the 1930s: Milhaud, Cocteau, Honegger, Tailleferre, Poulenc & Durey. Cocteau's drawing of the missing Auric rounds out the six. Poulenc's music fits nicely in this avant garde group, but he's as much a leader as a any of his composing colleagues.

This splendid collection of chamber music with piano is organized chronologically, but there's no real story arc of development or decline here; just Poulenc's prodigious, regular eruption of brightness and melancholy, of boisterous cheer and haunted longing. Pianist Paul Rivinius provides a solid lead at the keyboard, keeping his talented wind partners on task, but providing enough swing to keep thing alive and pulsing. This is a marvellous programme of Gallic charm and ingenuity that rewards close listening.

This album will be released on May 17, 2019

In the beginning is the night

From November 10, 2011:

Sandrine Piau's new collection of songs on Naive, entitled "Après un rêve", gathers a fascinating group of pieces by a wide range of composers that all share the subjects of dreams, sleeping, and waking. "In the beginning is the night," Piau says in the introductory note included in the uncommonly full and interesting liner notes, "the cradle of our childhood terrors, peopled with creatures as fearsome as they are fascinating..."

With more than capable support from pianist Susan Manoff, Piau is outstanding in the French songs - Faure, Chausson, Poulenc - and more than capable in the three by Richard Strauss. The song set "Galgenlieder" by Vincent Bouchot was new to me, and certainly fit the mood set by the rest of the pieces chosen for this recital. I was especially pleased with the three folk song arrangements of Benjamin Britten which finish the disc. They add a final childish twist to a sometimes spooky and always disorienting hour of music that's beautifully presented.