Word: poulence
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...heavy Italian repertoire. Last week, Adler opened the new season with a week of pure paesani, starting with Aïda - as the company has done so often that a local critic named the War Memorial Opera House the Aïdatorium. But the new season also includes Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, Strauss's Capriccio, Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades - all operas the Met audience will...
...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...
...full orchestra, the cantata parallels the psalms sung for the ancient Tenebrae service, in which the mystery of Christ's sacrifice is sung to diminishing candlelight, until at last only one candle remains-the Light of the World. The colors of the music suggest the gathering shadows, and Poulenc gives it a timeless serenity by weaving into it ancient liturgical forms along with angular modern music...
Schippers enriched his private memorial by playing the Poulenc Concerto for Organ in G Minor just before the perform ance of the Sept Répons. Having transferred keyboard notes to the foot pedals, he freed an arm for conducting, and with only one slip (a missed orchestral entry), he played with brilliant drive. The massive, 5,000-pipe organ overwhelmed the string orchestra, but Schippers coaxed out of the instrument all the music's high glories...
Sept Répons was one more reminder that Poulenc's genius lay more with choral music and songs than with instrumental music. His lyrical sensitivity to poetry led his songs into fragile moods that passed subtly from laughter into grief. "J'aime la voix humaine," he would say. and no composer of the century knew better how to write for it; Frenchmen now call him their Schubert, their Puccini. From the Mouvements Perpétuels he wrote at 19, through his days with the anti-impressionist Groupe des Six, on through all the rest of his career...