Superb Montreal wind quintet Pentaèdre has teamed up with pianist David Jalbert in an album devoted to chamber music by Francis Poulenc, who died 50 years ago. Because of the anniversary, we’re hearing a lot by the composer in 2013, including at the Canadian Opera Company.
The most affecting piece on this album released by Montreal’s ATMA Classique is the Élégie for horn and piano, written after the 1957 death of talented young horn virtuoso Denis Brain in a car crash. The composer’s anger at the loss is clearly palpable at the start of the piece, which eventually does settle into a quieter, more elegiac mode.
The Trio for piano, oboe and bassoon from the mid-1920s is a deep and delicious affair that beautifully intertwines the complementary timbres of the two double-reed instruments with a seductive piano part. Jalbert, bassoonist Mathieu Lussier and oboist Normand Forget are elegance personified.
The album ends with a limpid transcription for wind quintet of a 1927 Novelette (originally written for solo piano) that is as delicate as lace.
But in so much of the rest of the music represented here — a 1932 Sextet for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn (rewritten in 1939) as well as his last two pieces, Sonatas for flute and piano and clarinet and piano — it is as if Poulenc is trying very hard not to get too profound or beautiful. Any slower, more contemplative passages get eventually blown away by frolicsome, often cynical volleys of musical cackle.
The craft behind this music is huge. Poulenc has a way of getting deep inside the soul when he wants to, and his woodwind melodies are seduction itself, but there is this naughty, teasing side to the music as well that belies all the hard work that went into its writing — and Pentaèdre’s flawless interpretations.
The music is so well done here by these ideally matched collaborators that the final shape of this album is best left to each person’s individual tailoring on a playlist.
For all the details on this album, click here.
John Terauds