Poulenc: Complete Chamber Music, Vol. 4 Review

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Poulenc: Complete Chamber Music, Vol. 4 ReviewA claim could be made that Poulenc was at is best in songs. His music is clever and witty, often mischievous, and therefore grows tiresome if the joke goes on too long. This installment in Naxos's multi-volume Poulenc edition was taped in France and employs excellent musicians, including the pianist alexandre Tharaud, then in his twenties and on the verge of a prominent career. the recording dates of 1995 and 1997 led up to Poulenc's centennial in 1999. The featured work is one of the composer's most popular, Le bal masque. It sets nonsense poetry by the Dadaist writer Max Jacob. In hindsight the nonsense isn't funny or particularly telling; it's just nonsense. But this suited Poulenc's taste for the faddish and trivial, since his music was a riff on nonchalance carried off with style.
The other highlight is the abbreviated song cycle Le bestiaire, lasting less than five minutes, which sets six miniature poems, little more than epigrams, by Apollinaire; he was an immensely gifted poet who founded Surrealism, but these poems are not surreal. Poulenc's reputation as a musical voice of the manic inter-war period would be fixed if he had written only these two works, but the rest of the Cd is filled with similar songs. a real curiosity is the teenage composer's first public work, Rapsodie negre, a kind of Stravinskian steal that evokes primitive African moods. Poulenc was a dedicated magpie. Before he was twenty, he wrote to a London publisher that his favorite composers were Bizet, Satie, and Stravinsky. Self-taught and precocious, he mined Satie and Stravinsky his whole life, with clever results that are, for the most part, forgettable except as entertainments.
There's nothing wrong with being entertained, though. This album tends to sound like perky wallpaper after a while, but the baritone and tenor soloists capture the arch tone of these songs expertly, and at a bargain price, you couldn't find a nicer collection.Poulenc: Complete Chamber Music, Vol. 4 Overview

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