Allow me to share my words and experience with this incredible musician. This is my way of celebrating his enormous contribution to the history of music.
Francis Poulenc (Jan. 7, 1899–Jan. 30, 1963) has left many masterpieces, but particularly for us, flautists. No introduction is necessary for his Sonata for Flute and Piano. I still remember the very first time discovering this piece. My parents bought me a set of CDs comprises of the 20thcentury works for the flute. One of the pieces was the Sonata for Flute and Piano. I was in awe. I couldn’t control the joy of uncovering this wonder. What struck me the most is how magically the music unfolds its story.
The first movement is full of musical gestures, which flow with a few surprises in the piano part here and there. The music is quite simple, but it is always so challenging to achieve the simplicity in performances. The second movement is filled with songlike melodies and their beautifully accompanying harmonies. The piano has a repetitive accompaniment figure when the flute is playing the main melody, then the piano folds the flute passage with descending harmonic clusters, which remind me of a scene from an old black and white film where old memories appear with the cigarette smoke (please check out the clip from Casablanca below). The third movement resembles of a whimsical circus. The movement begins with a comical music; I always imagine that a magician pulls out a rabbit from his hat while acrobats are flying over the magician’s head. A minute before the piece ends, the flute takes a mini cadenza which is the moment of reflecting the second movement. This mini cadenza happens quite abruptly, and it immediately catches listeners’ attention; then the piano joins – a reprise of the first movement, but very slowly. Then the whimsical comedy returns, and the piece ends.
A few years ago, I was at the Met museum. I was strolling in the French Impressionism wing while listening to a set of French flute music from the 20thcentury. I stopped at three beautiful paintings by Pissarro, and my phone was playing the Poulenc Sonata. The paintings visually describe my musical imagination from the sonata … and the Sonata aurally depicts the scenes from the paintings – especially the first two movements. This experience brought me back to the magical moment when I first discovered this piece. I stood at the paintings until the recording was over, and silently came back to my apartment.
At the turn of the century, composers started writing music that is completely different from the old world’s music. The melody, the harmony, the form … they rather became the secondary matters. Using music as a vehicle to express the modern-world chaos, the desire to express one’s psychologically tormenting psyche initiated the new musical movement; the composers started exploring the possibilities of atonality. Francis Poulenc while living through the stylistic turmoil still continues the Parisian legacy of which Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy had established. Not only does Poulenc elegantly explore the unique instrumental timbres, but also he brings out subtle beauty in his music. Unlike the compositional trend of his time, the music of Poulenc expresses the tonal simplicity, which brings us the simple joy.
Jean-Pierre Rampal, flute / Robert Veyron-Lacroix, piano