Here is an excellent collection of artists — Conductor Stéphane Denève, soprano Marlis Petersen, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony and SWR Vocal Ensemble — united in powerful interpretations of two favourite, larger-scale works of Francis Poulenc: the Stabat Mater and Les Biches.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
This is a wonderful new album, released on the Hänssler Classic label. The credit goes, first and foremost, to Denève, who has the uncanny ability to get a lot of colour and punch out of an orchestra without ever making the music sound gaudy.
This is especially difficult with Francis Poulenc, who can be sweet and gentle one moment and absurdly silly the next. Yet the conductor makes everything sound just right in Les Biches, a crazy-quilt of a score for a Ballets Russes production premiered in 1924.
Poulenc veers madly between a sort of neo-classicism and a muscular modernism in the score. There are even two choral segments called “Chanson dansée.”
Denève paces everything as if there were real coquettes flirting with and being propositioned by garçons at a beach. The orchestra is tight and responsive, like a fine sports car.
The conductor was clearly itching to set up a counterpoint between Poulenc-the-spiritual and Poulenc-the-joker, programming the racy ballet with the most touching of all the texts a Roman Catholic composer could set to music.
Poulenc’s Stabat Mater, a late-Medieval poem by a Franciscan monk depicting Mary weeping at her crucified son on Good Friday, turns its back on the poignant intimacy of the moment as so gorgeously depicted by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi 200 years earlier, making this into a large-scale lament coming from a crowd of onlookers.
The composer had a spiritual epiphany in mid-life, and the choral works that he wrote afterward have a powerful intensity about them. Poulenc wrote the Stabat Mater in 1950 to mourn the death of a friend, the painter Christian Bérard
Silken-voiced soloist Marlis Peterson steps into the text twice, to address directly what Mary sees and the pain she wants to bear. The chorus — the gorgeously subtle SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart — sings throughout, sometimes with orchestral accompaniment, sometimes without. Here, too, we hear allusions to old musical styles, especially baroque, as well modern sounds.
These is a lot to love and savour.
Sound samples and details are available here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
