Music for Practical Jokers

Stands to reason that I would enjoy any music written by a man who was an inveterate joker.  Actually, way back when I was a kid, my brother played on the piano a valse (French waltz) by this man that always struck me as odd because the wrong note that kept intruding at a certain point in the music was so pointless that I could never figure out why it was there.

I know now that it was the musical equivalent of a photobomb.

The man?  Francis Poulenc, a French composer who was very much a man of the 20th century -- born in 1899, and died in 1963.  If you're the sort of person who can never resist trying to turn everything into a joke, then Poulenc's probably your man.  I plead guilty to the charge at once!

Claude Rostand defined Poulenc as "a bit of monk and a bit of hooligan."  It's a good description.  The austere beauty of some of his sacred choral music is every bit as much a part of the picture as the little ironic and sarcastic touches are in his instrumental music.  And what can you say of a man who could write an opera-bouffe based on Apollinaire's surrealist play Les mamelles de Tiresias ("The Breasts of Tiresias") in which a married woman named Therese becomes a man after her breasts turn into balloons and float away?

Consider Poulenc's Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra, premiered in 1932.  From start to finish, this modestly-scaled piece is never able to sink into solemnity for more than 10 or 15 seconds.  The first movement, in particular, is interrupted frequently by a little 8-bar theme on the pianos that sounds like it was lifted straight out of a can-can in a smoky Parisian night club.  Each time it appears, this little riff gets twisted into stranger and stranger harmonic shapes.  Kind of like the guy who keeps pulling weirder and weirder faces each time he photobombs a picture where he doesn't belong.  The slow second movement sounds like a tribute to Mozart, but "tribute" is a loaded word in Poulenc's musical lexicon, where its closest synonym is probably "mockery".  At any rate, the Concerto goes through its three movements in a matter of 18 or 19 minutes, full of high spirits and good fun.

In the early stereo era, Georges Pretre directed a 1957 recording for EMI which featured the composer as one of the soloists.  He may not have been a pianist of the first rank, but who better to capture the delicious two-faced ironies found throughout the score?  Another good recording came in 1986 from the French Erato label, with a young James Conlon conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.  The two pianists were Francois-Rene Duchable and Jean-Philippe Collard.  These performers also are completely in tune with the inherent witty character of the piece.

Even when Poulenc tried to be serious, he could have trouble sustaining the mood.  His Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani of 1938 inhabits a more serious world than the 2-Piano Concerto, but some of the blaring discords from the organ give the impressions that a naughty choirboy is still peeking out from behind the choirmaster's more solemn mask.  Certainly the overall impact is more majestic, the music more overt in tribute (without much mockery) to the great age of Bach and Buxtehude.  The thunderous opening chords, which recur several more times in the lengthy single movement, show that this is only one of many works of music inspired by Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, one of the great monuments of the organ literature.  At the same time, the lighter, faster passages undeniably come closer to the sound-world of the 2-Piano Concerto.

No doubt this Poulenc concerto is unique in its instrumentation, but the showy (albeit not difficult) organ part makes it an irresistible work for any orchestra whose hall includes a good big organ.  A fine example was the lengthy Grand Opening concert of Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto (1982) where the new pipe organ made by Gabriel Kney got a splendid workout in this piece.  It's also been heard in more recordings than almost any other Poulenc work, as so many organists love its marriage of baroque structure and style with 20th-century harmonic touches.  I have the partner of the James Conlon CD listed above, where the Rotterdam Orchestra and Conlon are joined by the splendid French organist Marie-Claire Alain (whose recent death ended a long and honoured career).

Hope that gives you a good idea of the diversity of style underlying the music of Francis Poulenc.  These two concertos are old favourites of mine, and definitely worth pulling out and enjoying from time to time.