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“A critic said that there is both a monk and a street urchin in me. That is an accurate description of my personality”. Poulenc was the first to admit the contradictions inherent in his music and character. A devout Catholic, he was openly gay, and his music can miraculously reconcile the deeply personal with the cheekily flippant. Close your ears to Poulenc and you’re missing out on some of the...
No one is pretending Poulenc's melodies and instrumental music are without their performing problems. But, rather curiously, he left many of his most fearsome challenges for his choral music: in phrasing, balance, articulation, register and, above all, tuning. For every piece that sits comfortably in a model armchair, there's another that stuns with chromatic leaps and bounds- and often the two...
It was the critic Claude Rostand, in 1950, who first adopted the phrase “moine ou voyou” to describe Francis Poulenc. It is translated here as “Half Monk/Half Rascal”, and though “moine” is certainly a monk, a “voyou” could easily be a more unsavoury character than a “rascal”. Rostand wanted to draw attention to the polarity between Poulenc’s devout Catholic faith and other aspects of his...
"Half monk, half rascal, they called him" , Poulenc's deep religous conviction shining through just as clearly in some works as his irreverent sense of humour did in others. Layton deftly contrasts both worlds on this disc, and the response of his Danish singers in works including the Sept chansons and Chansons francaises is both idiomatic and precisely-judged. A lovely record.
Reviewed by Guy...
A TIMELY Lenten celebration, this performance of the shorter of Bach's two great Passion settings impressed more than anything else for its consistency, the combined choirs of Trinity College Chapel and the Consort of Melbourne as crisp and true in pitch from the grinding initial chorus to the work's final chorale. Similarly, the period-style experts of Ludovico's Band sustained a high level of...
A TIMELY Lenten celebration, this performance of the shorter of Bach's two great Passion settings impressed more than anything else for its consistency, the combined choirs of Trinity College Chapel and the Consort of Melbourne as crisp and true in pitch from the grinding initial chorus to the work's final chorale. Similarly, the period-style experts of Ludovico's Band sustained a high level of...