The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: NPR and pianist Stephen Hough offers a fine appreciation of the contradictory but life-affirming gay 20th-century French composer Francis Poulenc on the 50th anniversary of his death.

By Jacob Stockinger

Francis Poulenc (below, a photo from Getty Images) remains one of my favorite 20th century composers.

His music is accessible and tonal, but distinctly modern. It is filled with wit and pathos as well as wonderfully bittersweet melodies and harmonies. And he wrote “crossover” before crossover was cool. He drew on the historical traditional of classical music but also on the French institution of the Music Hall.

Once treated as the buffoon of “Les Six” composers, he has proven the most durable of The Six, the one composer with the deepest talent and the most to say.

So I was particularly pleased to read the appreciation of Thursday, Jan. 30, the 50th anniversary of Poulenc’s death – the same day as the 216th birthday of Franz Schubert (below), another composer whose music is also so congenial and deep at the same time.

There is something summery about Poulenc’s music, as I have written before, so thinking about him in deep winter is refreshing.

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/classical-music-today-is-the-summer-solstice-and-nobody-wrote-better-summer-music-than-francis-poulenc/

The more recent appreciation — complete with a wonderful YouTube video clip from the Concerto for two Pianos — was written by NPR classical music blogger Tom Huizenga (below), who directs the blog “Deceptive Cadence.” It captures the contradictions and beauty of this unique composer and man who seems like he would be good to know as a friend.

Here is a link to the blog post:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/01/30/170662245/a-little-part-of-poulenc-in-all-of-us

Here is a link to a wonderful appreciation by the gay British pianist Stephen Hough (below), who wrote it for his blog:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/stephenhough/100067985/the-three-faces-of-francis-poulenc/

And here is one of my favorite pieces, his Novelette No. 1 for solo piano, with its poignant and charming neo-Classical or neo-Mozartean flavor, even down to the ornaments, as played on a YouTube video by Gabriel Tacchino along with the other two novelettes — the second one whimsical and the last darkly romantic. The triptych seems to capture the different sides of Francis Poulenc: