Wednesday 23/10/13 lpo/nezet-seguin/prokofiev/poulenc live r3

[jayne lee wilson]

Three works of the highest quality which rarely feature in live performance...

Poulenc Piano Concerto (1950) (with Alexandre Tharaud)
Prokofiev Symphony No.7 (1951-2)
***
Poulenc Stabat Mater (1950)

I've always felt the Prokofiev to be a deeper and darker work than is often assumed, so long as the appalling, tacked-on "happy ending" is omitted. The first movement especially contains some of his most beautiful and elegiac inspirations.

Poulenc's Stabat Mater, introverted sister to his equally wonderful Gloria, is simply one of the choral masterpieces of the 20thCentury, and has been recorded recently by Stephane Deneve with his SWR Stuttgart forces, for which relief... (my own preference is for Baudo/Lyon/HM).

... and the cyclothymic mood-switches of Poulenc's Piano Concerto, whose contrasts are best emphasised rather than neoclassically understated, sets the scene for the gentle, wistful elegies which follow it.

[jayne lee wilson]

A quick bump for this one... the opening of the Poulenc Piano Concerto - a true cantgetchaouttamyhead, once-heard-never-forgotten tune - always seems redolent of the French New Wave cinema. You could imagine it soundtracking a bittersweet romance by Chabrol or Lelouch...

[Serial_Apologist]

A quick bump for this one... the opening of the Poulenc Piano Concerto - a true cantgetchaouttamyhead, once-heard-never-forgotten tune - always seems redolent of the French New Wave cinema. You could imagine it soundtracking a bittersweet romance by Chabrol or Lelouch...

Yes I was won over by all that capitalist realist stuff in the late 60s - "Vivre pour vivre" etc etc. Hard to live that down nowadays! We shouldn't really blame Poulenc though - or should we? By the time of the PC I think he'd reached a stage of parodying himself, albeit affectionately: the humour's much more "knowing" than in "Le Bal Masque" of 20 years earlier - in fact one might not recognise it at all except for the youthful works like "Les Biches"; but who today might respond spontaneously to the stylistic incongruities the way one did back then?

[teamsaint]

well I was going to try to listen to this tonight,after JLWs initial big build up, but I'm a bit overawed now, by the posts above, so I might listen to whatever is on Radio 2 instead.

And Poulenc is somebody I need to show birthday solidarity with too.

Oh, maybe I'll give it a go, and read a bluffers guide to French composers. Happy listening, folks !!

[Serial_Apologist]

well I was going to try to listen to this tonight,after JLWs initial big build up, but I'm a bit overawed now, by the posts above, so I might listen to whatever is on Radio 2 instead.

And Poulenc is somebody I need to show birthday solidarity with too.

Oh, maybe I'll give it a go, and read a bluffers guide to French composers. Happy listening, folks !!

Oh cummon TS - we're talking easy listening in modernist terms here!

[teamsaint]

Oh cummon TS - we're talking easy listening in modernist terms here!

oh its not the listening that's the problem,I like a listening challenge in any case !
Its the banter thats the problem. !!!!!!! Nightmare.

[Serial_Apologist]

oh its not the listening that's the problem,I like a listening challenge in any case !
Its the banter thats the problem. !!!!!!! Nightmare.

But no more exclusive than footie chat!

[jayne lee wilson]

Oh what a wonderful, profoundly uplifting piece that Poulenc Stabat Mater is!...very beautifully sung and played tonight.

Reservations about the rather charmless soloist in the Piano Concerto aside, a glorious and very moving concert...
more later if time & energy allow...

[teamsaint]

But no more exclusive than footie chat!

you mean fewer people are interested?!

anyway, Prokofiev's symphonies only reveal themselves slowly to me, except #3 which knocked me out the first time I heard it.

The Poulenc PC is new to me, and , as you were suggesting I think, demands or asks for an understanding of background,and his earlier work. Interesting stuff, but it will have to be a taster for now.

I'll have to catch up with the Stabat Mater later.

[Serial_Apologist]

Oh what a wonderful, profoundly uplifting piece that Poulenc Stabat Mater is!...very beautifully sung and played tonight.

Reservations about the rather charmless soloist in the Piano Concerto aside, a glorious and very moving concert...
more later if time & energy allow...

That was my first hearing of the SM, and I agree, JLW. I taped the PC on one of my last remaining c90s and will have a re-listen tomorrow to see if I agree regarding the pianist. Both works contain some of Poulenc's most gorgeous orchestration, but I haven't seen either score: it could be that, as in the case of Ravel - and there is so much Ravel in later Poulenc - the composer demands non-expressive playing to underline the contradiction between a dry detached surface and sensuous subcutaneous layers in the scoring. I could be entirely wrong here, but this is going by recordings of Poulenc's deadpan manner of playing of his own pieces. The current way seems to be to treat his idiom literally.

[Serial_Apologist]

you mean fewer people are interested?!

anyway, Prokofiev's symphonies only reveal themselves slowly to me, except #3 which knocked me out the first time I heard it.

The Poulenc PC is new to me, and , as you were suggesting I think, demands or asks for an understanding of background,and his earlier work. Interesting stuff, but it will have to be a taster for now.

I'll have to catch up with the Stabat Mater later.

I hadn't heard the reticent Prokofiev 7th symphony previously - a case of someone forcing himself to put notes on paper, I felt. Practically anyone other than Prokofiev would not have been worth listening to - I was moved.

[edashtav]

I hadn't heard the reticent Prokofiev 7th symphony previously - a case of someone forcing himself to put notes on paper, I felt. Practically anyone other than Prokofiev would not have been worth listening to - I was moved.

The minimalism of Prokofiev's 7th Symphony, it economy, transparency, coupled with that awful knowledge , that I'm sure Prokofiev had whilst writing it, that this is his final testament, I find very moving. Prokofiev doesn't "emote", his inner world is normally kept in deep reserve, but here I feel that as his world winds down his carapace wears thin and becomes cracked, showing the Russian soul that lies behind. Tonight's performance was clean & accurate, almost metronomic. For once, I could have done with less accuracy, more randomness as the clock of life slows and becomes an irregular tick. By the way - do other boarders feel the kinship - particularly at the end- between this and Shostakovich's final symphony?

Is is really 50 years since Poulenc died? I see him, not as the fine figure, drawn so admiringly by Jayne but as a petit maitre. I shall not be popular by saying that his relative importance for me is about the same as Britten's - influential in his home country, but less important abroad. Neither Britten nor Poulenc could encompass a proper Symphony, both excelled in the small scale world of song, and both seasoned their traditional idiom with a pinch of the spice of modernism. I found tonight's Stabat Mater a little low-voltage for my taste - some of its most secure and expressive moments came in unaccompanied singing by the chorus. Of course, this man from the S. won't say anything nasty about Bournemouth's Kate Royal - but does she support her lower register as well as her higher range? Good to hear this careful, well -prepared performance, and I look forward to renewing acquaintance with the street urchin Piano Concerto on iPlayer. I enjoyed the pianist playing Francois Couperin in the interval - a reminder of another influence that Francis Poulenc partially absorbed.

[Serial_Apologist]

Couperin! My attention being on the blink, I'd imagined that to have been one of the Scarlattis!

It has been said that Ravel loved Couperin, Debussy Rameau; but one hears so little of either that one takes such statements on faith.

Not so sure about your comparison bwetween the two symphonies: as you say, edashtav, about Prokofiev holding back on emotional expression (though what about his Sixth, almost Mahlerian in emotional depth and scope?); I'd say Shostakovitch sensed a greater connection with the Russian people and displayed his irony more easily on his sleeve.

[jayne lee wilson]

The Poulenc Piano Concerto was very well played by the LPO, but was a little texturally heavy and expressively cool, conductor and soloist taking it seriously (perhaps a little TOO seriously) as a post-Romantic 20thCentury concerto. I'm not sure this works; at any rate I missed the French orchestral sound here, the suavity, colour and grace evinced by Dutoit and Roge or those earlier Parisian Classics. This may have been because the soloist wouldn't "let go" - remaining strangely straight-laced and straight-faced, too charmless by far in music which demands a vivid sense of its moods and allusions. I wouldn't over-think its predecessors or background too much - just go with its rapid-fire bipolarities.

This seriousness, the rich and dark orchestral timbres (noticeably weighty lower strings) served the Prokofiev 7th far better of course. Here, the measured tempi and full-throated cantabile in the haunting 1st movement melodies seemed to beckon at repressed tragedy. If interpretatively still a little too sober in the more playful passages of the scherzo, the strings (violins especially) were gorgeously expressive in the adagio, and Nezet-Seguin judged the finale perfectly - a raising of the emotional temperature, an exact blend of weight, gravity and frenetic energy, the search for an impossible resolution - this performance, surely true to the spirit of the work, left a vivid and haunting impression of fond, idealised memories and regret, of a tragedy almost faced - but finally - painfully - looked away from.

A resigned and haunting coda to a complex and difficult life...

I'll never stop loving Poulenc's Stabat Mater. This was again a weighty, slightly Germanic-sounding performance; but it is a serious work, and it would be a shame if more listeners don't seek it out and learn to know and love it, just because it doesn't initially have the epic length or impact of a Missa Solemnis or a German Requiem. It belongs more with Szymanowski's Stabat Mater, Petrassi's Magnificat - or indeed Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. All highly original masterpieces of Religious text-setting which don't always need to storm heaven to make their beautiful, memorable and expressive points.
And for me at least, it's impossible to remain dry-eyed when those final cries of "Paradisi Gloria" fade down and fade away, their appeal to serenity heavily tinged with loss and lost love...

"Fac me vere tecum flere!"

[Sir Velo]

Neither Britten nor Poulenc could encompass a proper Symphony,

Following that line of argument, one could level the same criticism at Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Boulez, Ligeti, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss (R) et al. This really is a straw man argument; it only has validity if it could be proved that either composer desperately wanted to compose a symphony but aborted it through inability to compose one. Moreover, in the mid late 20th century the symphony had already lost its place as the acme of compositional technique. Do we really value Honegger, Piston, Rautavaara ahead of Berg and Bartok?

both excelled in the small scale world of song

As did Schubert, Schumann, Wolf and Mozart but they are great composers, non?

Actually, I would say that Britten actually composes song cycles rather than individual lieder, which is a rather different thing. Moreover, Britten's true metier is opera, where his canvases assume large scale proportions. Similarly, there is nothing small scale about the War Requiem,or the 2nd and 3rd string quartets, Violin Concerto, Sinfonia da Requiem etc. Poulenc, I grant you, is a minor master; albeit, a highly entertaining and clever one.