Word: poulenc
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...Poulenc: Concerto in D Minor (Angel) features the late Francis Poulenc and Jacques Fevrier as the two pianists in Poulenc's familiar and joyously baroque double concerto. Concert Champétre for Harpsichord and Orchestra, on the other side, is not vintage Poulenc, though played with mercurial zeal by Harpsichordist Aimée van de Wiele...
Nothing was so amusing to French Composer Francis Poulenc as hearing his friends marvel at the quilt of contradictions that masked his music and his life. "I am half-monk, half-bounder," he would say, and his friends would add that he was also a cultured vulgarian, a moody wit, a seedy dandy-a puzzle. He wrote flippant music and sacred music, funny, jazzy profane music, and he also wrote some of the century's greatest songs. Since his death in Paris last January, the Poulenc puzzle has become his epitaph-as though his critics and colleagues would rather...
...Conversation. The first première, a Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, played by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein, had the misfortune of being the marquee come-on for an all-Poulenc concert that included some vintage works-the beautiful Fiançailles pour Rire song cycle, the lovely a cappella Motets. The sonata's first movement is nervously melodic, the second drowsily romantic, the third merely gymnastic; nowhere does the music lead the two instruments into the tense conversation the form requires. The piano simply accompanies the clarinet, as in a coloratura song, and the clarinet does little...
...second premiere, performed by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Thomas Schippers, was another matter. It was a cantata called Sept Répons des Ténèbres, and it impressively proved that Poulenc's last year, like his other 45 as a composer, was blessed with exalted days. In Sept Répons, Poulenc resolved the devotional strain that runs through much of his music; the composition is a hymn for Holy Week that, as a French critic said after Poulenc's death, "springs from a soul taken by an ideal...
...most common cause is a tiny parasite, the protozoan Trichomonas vaginalis, against which medicine has had no effective defense. Of 50 or more remedies listed in doctors' reference books, all must be used locally. Flagyl (chemical name: metronidazole), synthesized by France's Rhône-Poulenc laboratories, is the first effective trichomonacide taken by mouth; it gets into the bloodstream and can track down the parasites in internal glands where some of them hide. For this reason, it is also the first useful drug for men, who often pick up the parasites from their wives and may suffer...