FRANCIS POULENC – PIANO WORKS

Poulenc (1899-1963) was a pianist himself, and composed solo piano pieces the whole of his artistic life, from the early Trois mouvements perpétuels of 1918, when he was 19 years old, to the third Novelette and last Improvisation of 1959, both included on this CD, not long before his death. When he was 15, his mother had found for him the ideal and congenial piano teacher in the Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes, who became his mentor and encouraged the young Poulenc in every way. Viñes was a virtuoso pianist who was a major figure in the musical world of the time, performing many of the works of Debussy, Ravel and other contemporary French composers, and who introduced many of the works of Albéniz and other Spanish composers to French audiences. Poulenc would attest that, in particular, Viñes taught him the art of using the pedal, so prominent and so strongly demanded by Poulenc, as will be noted frequently below. (Poulenc felt that pianists never used enough pedal in his music, which asks to be ‘bathed in pedals’ on more than one occasion.) He also introduced Poulenc to Satie and to Stravinsky. Satie took Poulenc into his fold to be a member of the group of young French composers Les Six, while Stravinsky found Poulenc his first publisher, the English firm of Chester Music, who published, among other works, the three Novelettes on this CD. All this time, Poulenc had not had any formal training in composition, in fact had been turned away by Paul Vidal, professor at the Conservatoire, who was offended by the work that Poulenc brought to him and by the dedication to Satie, ‘yelling “your work is disgusting, inept, a load of tasteless garbage…”’. Eventually, in 1921, when he was already a published composer with many public performances to his credit, Poulenc met and began four years of private lessons with Charles Koechlin, French composer and pedagogue, who worked with him on counterpoint, harmony, and compositional techniques.

Through the 1920s, Poulenc was finding his voice. His piano works of this decade – Napoli, an early suite of 1922-25, Trois Pièces of 1918-28, the first two Novelettes of 1927-28 discussed below, and even the substantial and intriguing 8 Nocturnes of 1929-30 – can appear as rather odd juxtapositions of contrasting styles, almost as if the different pieces within each set were written by different composers. The 1930s were when Poulenc really came into his own as a composer for piano solo, and when the bulk of his piano works were written.