Bartje Bartmans | Poulenc/Berkeley - Flute Sonata (1957/1977) @bartjebartmans | Uploaded August 2024 | Updated October 2024, 1 week ago.
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include mélodies, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels (1919), the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, choir and orchestra.
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Sonate pour flûte et piano (Flute Sonata), FP 164 (1957)
Orchestrated by Lennox Berkeley (1977)
1. Allegro malinconico (0:00)
2. Cantilena. Assez lent ((5:02)
3. Presto giocoso (9:12)
Emily Beynon, flute and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by
Bramwell Tovey
Poulenc began to think of writing a flute sonata in 1952, but he was occupied with his Sonata for Two Pianos and then his opera, Dialogues des Carmélites. In April 1956, when he was still working on the opera, he was approached by Harold Spivacke of the American Library of Congress with a request to write a piece for two pianos or alternatively a chamber piece for up to six instruments. Poulenc was too busy to accept, but Spivacke persisted. Poulenc told him, "Much more at home with wind instruments than strings, I admit I am tempted by this combination", as he had always preferred winds – with their similarities to the human voice – to stringed instruments. In August he agreed to go ahead. The sonata was commissioned in memory of a musical benefactor, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, to whom Poulenc dedicated the work.
Poulenc spent the winter of 1956–57 in Cannes, where he composed the sonata between December and March. When he had completed the first two of the three movements, he wrote to his friend Pierre Bernac:
In working on this Flute Sonata I have the feeling of going back a long way, but with a more settled technique. It's a sonata of Debussyan dimensions. It's the French sense of balance [la mesure française]. Finding the form for your language is the most difficult thing. It's what Webern has in the highest degree … and what Boulez has not yet found.
On 18 June 1957, the public premiere was given at the Strasbourg Music Festival by the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, for whom it had been written, with the composer at the piano. Le Figaro said of the work, "The music burst forth from the heart, without formality, and 'sang', in every sense". Another critic stated that the sonata was "the best of Poulenc, and even a little better".
In 1976 the flautist James Galway asked the English composer Sir Lennox Berkeley, a good friend of Poulenc's for many years, to orchestrate the sonata. While working on it, Berkeley wrote in his diary:
The task of orchestrating Poulenc's Flute Sonata ... proves as difficult as I had feared. ... The difficulty is the entirely pianistic nature of the accompaniment, extremely difficult to translate into orchestral terms. ... Another difficulty is that Francis, though there are things I love in his music, has passages that are strangely clumsy and that I long to rewrite, but of course I can't add or subtract anything and I should only spoil the whole thing … I have to think all the time of how he would have wanted it to sound.
The musicologist Roger Covell wrote of Berkeley's orchestration, "It is hard to imagine the job being done better … this sonata-concerto has Poulenc's characteristic and attractive mixture of flippancy and tenderness". The Musical Times commented in 1978 that "the orchestration does complete justice to the composer. [It] adds a worthwhile new dimension to the music: the long-drawn sad melodic lines played by the flute, especially in the first two movements, are complemented in a way not possible on the piano".
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include mélodies, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels (1919), the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, choir and orchestra.
Please support my channel:
ko-fi.com/bartjebartmans
Sonate pour flûte et piano (Flute Sonata), FP 164 (1957)
Orchestrated by Lennox Berkeley (1977)
1. Allegro malinconico (0:00)
2. Cantilena. Assez lent ((5:02)
3. Presto giocoso (9:12)
Emily Beynon, flute and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by
Bramwell Tovey
Poulenc began to think of writing a flute sonata in 1952, but he was occupied with his Sonata for Two Pianos and then his opera, Dialogues des Carmélites. In April 1956, when he was still working on the opera, he was approached by Harold Spivacke of the American Library of Congress with a request to write a piece for two pianos or alternatively a chamber piece for up to six instruments. Poulenc was too busy to accept, but Spivacke persisted. Poulenc told him, "Much more at home with wind instruments than strings, I admit I am tempted by this combination", as he had always preferred winds – with their similarities to the human voice – to stringed instruments. In August he agreed to go ahead. The sonata was commissioned in memory of a musical benefactor, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, to whom Poulenc dedicated the work.
Poulenc spent the winter of 1956–57 in Cannes, where he composed the sonata between December and March. When he had completed the first two of the three movements, he wrote to his friend Pierre Bernac:
In working on this Flute Sonata I have the feeling of going back a long way, but with a more settled technique. It's a sonata of Debussyan dimensions. It's the French sense of balance [la mesure française]. Finding the form for your language is the most difficult thing. It's what Webern has in the highest degree … and what Boulez has not yet found.
On 18 June 1957, the public premiere was given at the Strasbourg Music Festival by the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, for whom it had been written, with the composer at the piano. Le Figaro said of the work, "The music burst forth from the heart, without formality, and 'sang', in every sense". Another critic stated that the sonata was "the best of Poulenc, and even a little better".
In 1976 the flautist James Galway asked the English composer Sir Lennox Berkeley, a good friend of Poulenc's for many years, to orchestrate the sonata. While working on it, Berkeley wrote in his diary:
The task of orchestrating Poulenc's Flute Sonata ... proves as difficult as I had feared. ... The difficulty is the entirely pianistic nature of the accompaniment, extremely difficult to translate into orchestral terms. ... Another difficulty is that Francis, though there are things I love in his music, has passages that are strangely clumsy and that I long to rewrite, but of course I can't add or subtract anything and I should only spoil the whole thing … I have to think all the time of how he would have wanted it to sound.
The musicologist Roger Covell wrote of Berkeley's orchestration, "It is hard to imagine the job being done better … this sonata-concerto has Poulenc's characteristic and attractive mixture of flippancy and tenderness". The Musical Times commented in 1978 that "the orchestration does complete justice to the composer. [It] adds a worthwhile new dimension to the music: the long-drawn sad melodic lines played by the flute, especially in the first two movements, are complemented in a way not possible on the piano".
