#francispoulenc

[cliggomusic]

Listen to Francis Poulenc for free: https://music.cliggo.com/artist/361814-Francis_Poulenc

[alvaespi]

Drama al 1000% #DialogosDeCarmelitas #FrancisPoulenc la última de la temporada 2018-19 del #MetHD @metopera (en Auditorio Nacional) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxVZnXbgeY2/?igshid=1e8u3q6hqkzcb

[giuseppemirizio]

Omaggio a Poulenc: Raffaella Migailo - pianoforte Francesca Ruospo - soprano 11 marzo 2019 #poulenc #francispoulenc #classicalmusic #pianist #soprano #instaclassical #instamusicians #opera #operamusic #instapics #instalike #instagramstories (presso Conservatorio Nino Rota) https://www.instagram.com/giuseppemirizio/p/Bu4rGrrHBGv/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1j4yg6x31sqax

[agnesweber]

Perduto, 2009. #lavoixhumaine #jeancocteau #francispoulenc #theater #carnetdebord #agnesweber (presso Teatro Grande) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bqjy41rADvh/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=147pfhd2v6voo

[hypersausage-blog1]

#FrancisPoulenc #Gloria #OrganConcerto #RosannaCarteri #MauriceDuruffle #GeorgesPretre #FrenchNationalRadioandTelevisionOrchestra . . . . . #vinyl #vinylcollection #vinylcollector #record #recordcollection #recordcollector #album #LP #musiclover #classicalmusic #recordoftheday #photooftheday #ig_photooftheday #recordplayer #turntable #sacredmusic #concerto #orchestralmusic #organmusic #poulenc #pretre #carteri #duruffle https://www.instagram.com/p/BpXrc0vnESr/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=4hg1e1jxo69x

[corflammae]

Meet our composers: Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

“You have changed my life, you are the sunshine of my thirty years, a reason for living and for working.” This is how Francis Poulenc openly inscribed the score to his Concert champêtre, a work that is dedicated to the painter Richard Chanlaire.

Chanlaire operated a large Parisian art shop and a gallery in Tourrettes-sur-Loup, a town in the mountains above Nice. Although Poulenc had known him since the mid-twenties, references to homosexual activities begin to appear only in early May 1929. He eventually avowed his love for Chanlaire in a letter to Valentine Hugo. “How happy I was to be able to confide to you my great secret, my grave secret. This amazing, but so anguishing love of which I spoke to you being now the sole raison d’être of my life, you understand how hard, due to this anomaly, it is to hide it.” Yet at that time according to some scholars, “Poulenc associated gay sex with impurity and could therefore never truly accept this relationship, let alone a gay identity.” Throughout this career, Poulenc collaborated with a number of homosexual artists, among them Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau and Benjamin Britten, and from the late twenties, his intimate relationships whether long term or casual, were virtually all with men. His intimate relationship with Chanlaire was destined to be short-lived, as Poulenc turned towards Raymond Destouches, a bisexual chauffeur from Noizay. Destouches remained a close personal friend — despite eventually marrying a woman — and he unwittingly was the inspiration for the opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias, in which an abandoned husband dresses up in his wife’s clothes and miraculously gives birth to 40,000 children. Les Mamelles is dedicated to Destouches, as is the 1943 resistance cantata La figure humaine, and the neo-romantic Pastoral Mélancolie.

Poulenc soon demonstrated his sexual versatility when he fathered a daughter with a woman known as Frédérique. Although Poulenc never formally admitted that he was indeed the biological father of Marie-Ange, her mother “Freddy” is nevertheless the dedicatee of two compositions. A chance meeting on a train in 1950 marked the start of a troubled five-year relationship with Lucien Robert, a traveling salesman from Marseilles. Their relationship abruptly terminated while Poulenc was putting the finishing touches on his opera Dialogues des Carmélitesa, and the cause was Raymond Destouches, who had fallen seriously ill with pleurisy. The score was completed on the very same evening as Destouches’ death in October 1955. Poulenc found solace and comfort in the arms of the young soldier Louis Gautier. Their relationship lasted until Poulenc’s death in 1963. Poulenc’s personality, psyche, music and sexual behavior contained contrasts and contradictions that were not alternating but simultaneous. And Poulenc was well aware of that fact, as he once famously wrote, “you know that I am just as sincere in my faith, without any messianic screaming, as I am in my Parisian sexuality.”

[operandesign]

This is so sad: listen to Jessye Norman sing a Poulenc song to perfection – then murder it

A recent trawl of YouTube bagged me a performance of Poulenc’s "Les chemins de l’amour" as performed by the great Jessye Norman on television. To understand what I’m about to say you first need to listen to her studio recording of this beautiful song from 1990.

It’s a masterclass in singing, and breath control. The voice is full and rich. The phrasing is natural and the sentences flow. Listen to how she pulls off a diminuendo on the last note – with a pointed full stop. It simply takes my breath away! Singing doesn’t come better than this.

Then I found THIS performance (on French television?) on YouTube.

She manages to stretch the thing out from four minutes to nearly six. The performance is grand, not to say indulgent. The way she clips and plunges into every single word as if everything is double-lined with a DayGlo highlighter completely breaks the sense of the song. The long glissandos sneak in unexpectedly and stay like a bad stench. You’re now listening to La Norman doing a star turn on every note. To describe this as mannered is an understatement.

But there's worse to come. Much, much worse.

In 2009 Jessye Norman came out with a bizarre version of "Les chemins" as part of the Roots: My Life, My Song album. It starts with a jazz intro à la Jack the Knife. Since it was a live show I expect that’s just the warm-up before she comes back on stage for the Poulenc. Even so, the cross-melding effect is incongruous and disorientating.

Then her voice comes in. And I nearly fell off my chair. It's a full octave below. Maybe she fancies herself as a latter day Nina Simone? Well, she isn't. At times – how can I put this? – she seems to produce a mooing sound. It really is distressing to hear.

This has got to stop. One of the great sopranos of the past few decades is ruining her legacy, and that is a terrible thing – as fans of Maria Callas know only too well.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph~ Originally published on 6 Nov 2013