The critic Claude Rostand famously noticed, “In Poulenc there’s something of the monk and one thing of the rascal.”
We hear this in Francis Poulenc’s Sextet for Piano and Winds, composed between 1931 and 1932, and revised in 1939. Scored for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn, it’s music stuffed with impish humor. At occasions, its comedian voices, with their distinct personas, tackle a satirical tone. Because the work unfolds, we get glimpses of melancholy lurking beneath the floor.
“He at all times positioned an excellent worth on being thought to be gentle, charming, frivolous, and flip,” wrote Rostand of the composer. “He cherished risqué jokes and a Rabelaisian lifestyle…It was a degree of honor for him by no means to seem severe…Behind this spontaneity, this simple and ironic chopping up, was hidden a lot interior turmoil.”
Influenced by the surrealistic music of Erik Satie, Poulenc was a member of “Les Six,” a bunch of French composers who sought to maneuver past the affect of Wagner and German Romanticism, in addition to the Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel. Stripped of sentimentality, the ensuing music exhibited a biting, witty Neoclassicism. It assimilated jazz, the music of the circus and the boulevard cafes, and the vaudeville strains of the Parisian music corridor.
Poulenc wrote the Sextet as “an homage to the wind devices I’ve cherished from the second I started composing.” The opening of the primary motion (Allegro vivace) erupts with boisterous ascending scales. A raucous woodwind dialog consists of gleeful taunts. It’s propelled ahead by an exhilarating piano ostinato, a form of wild Machine Age motor. The motion is forged in ternary type (A-B-A). The center part begins with a mournful, solitary assertion by the bassoon. The music which follows is gradual, songlike, and haunting. Some listeners hear an allusion to the favored tune, Melancholy Baby, recorded in 1934 by the Jazz singer, Al Bowlly.
The second motion (Divertissement) begins as a serene parody of a gradual motion from a Mozart piano concerto. The center part takes a sudden comedian flip, with a playful fast march. The motion’s last bars drift off with a way of thriller.
The ultimate motion (Prestissimo) begins with “an Offenbachian gallop.” (Suppose the well-known Can-Can from the operetta Orpheus within the Underworld). With a buffoonish assertion within the horn, echoed by different wind devices, the rollicking rondo is propelled ahead. Wearing ragtime garb, melodies from the earlier actions return. The enjoyable hits a brick wall with a shrieking parody of Neoclassical Stravinsky. Abandoning the earlier frivolity, the coda part is quiet and wistful. Its last moments ship one thing akin to the magical, shimmering crescendo which closes Ravel’s “Mother Goose” Suite. A last jazzy chord brings the Sextet to an in depth.
I. Allegro vivace:
II. Divertissement (Andantino):
III. Finale (Prestissimo):
Recordings
- Poulenc: Sextet, FP 100, Ralf Gothóni, Danish Nationwide Radio Symphony Orchestra Wind Quintet Naxos
Featured Picture: An illustration from Les Ateliers de Martine, Paul Iribe
