Francis Poulenc as Composer and Performer

Cover of the album being discussed, with a reminder of the other “centenary” event (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Following up on last month’s “centenary tribute” album of recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, this coming Friday will see a release by SOMM Recordings of an album of piano performances by the French composer Francis Poulenc. The full title of the album is Poulenc plays Poulenc and Satie, and Poulenc plays piano on all 34 tracks. Twelve of the tracks are solo performances of Satie’s music. The solo performances of his own music are complemented by his two-piano concerto in D minor at the beginning, with Jacques Février on the other piano, and the “Aubade” for piano and eighteen instruments at the conclusion. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

During my high school days, when i would escape the suburbs to go to concerts in Philadelphia, the concept of modernism tended to be embodied by the six French composers that had been inspired by Erik Satie, known, appropriately enough, as Les Six. Poulenc was one of the best-known of this group, as was Darius Milhaud. Georges Auric was probably better known for film scores, Arthur Honegger was more talked-about than listened-to, Germaine Tailleferre was known primarily as the only female composer in the group, and these days Louis Durey is all but forgotten.

It was only as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that I first encountered a professor that was dismissive of Les Six in favor of the First Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Now I am in a new century; and, during his tenure as Music Director for the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas was never shy about his enthusiasm for the First Viennese School. On the other hand, my encounters with Les Six during the first quarter of this new century have been few and far between.

As a result, I found that I was approaching the new SOMM album as a trip down memory lane. That included Poulenc the pianist as well as Poulenc the composer. Indeed, the Columbia album I purchased of his sextet for piano and wind quintet had him performing with the first-chair wind players of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Amazon.com does not seem to know about this recording, but Discogs has a Web page from which four copies of the original vinyl are available for purchase.

Thus, when I approached Poulenc plays Poulenc and Satie, Poulenc was already quite familiar to me as both composer and performer. Indeed, over the course of my writing on this site, while neither of the composers has received a generous amount of “column space,” attention to Satie has been a little more than a third of attention to Poulenc. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that the attentiveness of the “disciple” to the “master” makes for a listening experience that deserves more attention than at least some of the more recent recording of Satie’s piano music. (Since I know nothing about Poulenc as a teacher, I have no idea whether his knowledge of Satie was passed on to his pupils.)

These days I am more attentive to Satie than I am to Poulenc. Nevertheless, I appreciate the extent to which the latter had been informed by the former, so to speak. The first day of this month marked another “centenary” event: Satie died on July 1, 1925. As of this writing, this Poulenc album has been my only encounter with that event. One would have thought that the anniversary would have prompted more interest.