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Summary: Poulenc's Fascinating World
Comment: Poulenc's piano music has many notable influences of fellow French composers Satie and Chabrier but takes them further in his invention. Poulenc's sound world is endlessly fascinating in its unpredictable, spunky rhythyms and structures - yet not without an attractive poetic depth in the slower movements.
Normally I give more technical reviews on the music, history, performer and performance, but my response to this curiously chromatic, often quirky and upbeat and delicately nuanced music is one of pure emotional inspiration. Hearing this music always now puts me in a good mood. I'm sure I'll one day more analyze the style and compositions in detail, but for now its quite rewarding just to enjoy such interesting music and fine pianism.
There is something to be said of a French pianist playing French music as Pascal Roge's performances here just sound so right for the music beneath his hands. The full and vivid Decca sound quality makes this music sparkle like the Parisian nightlife of Poulenc's time. Compositions - 4.5 stars; Performance - 5 stars; Sound - 5 stars.
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Summary: Rewarding performances!
Comment: Francis Poulenc was among the "Six" who demonstrated to have a special knack to bridge the gap between the classical and modern styles through his inexhaustible melodic inspiration, piquant melodies and sense of humor, much more suggestive respect Darius Milhaud, for instance in the music for piano.
Gifted of unusual skills for finding motives from different sources, his powerful imagination allowed him to create pages filled of colorfulness, cheerful lyricism, hovered by a Pagan humor; he was by far, the most Dionysian composer of the group, despite of the fact the whole attention of great audiences seemed to focus around orchestral proposals as Erick Satie with Parade or Milhaud's Creation of world or Honegger's Pacific 231, to my mind, this was due Debussy was the supreme Midas King of the piano by then and the new orchestral sounds were bitter, sinister and profoundly delirious. The boiling point of so many artistic tendencies, conveyed the interest of a new public much more visual than rational or auditory. On the other hand the artistic concerns of Oliver Messiaen found an absolute receptivity in the late generations after the WW1, who found in his music a kind of spiritual lightning together with Alan Hovhaness for instance. In this sense, his music simply was overlooked during the first decade of the XX Century and it had to wait for new blossom in the early sixties when pianists of the artistic height of Gabriel Tachino, Leonard Pennario and Aldo Ciccolini made of him a widely known throughout the world.
Pascal Roge has emerged as one pof the most prominent inheritor of a generation of French colorist pianists, which has contributed by fat to diffuse his music. Go for this album.
His music works out as a deserved expansion of the sonorous possibilities, elusive lyricism, and irreverent whacks, spattered of humor and good taste.
Recommended without hesitation.
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Summary: BAGATELLES SPIRITUELLES
Comment: This disc won a Gramophone award in 1988, the citation praising in particular the `tenderness and sensitivity' of the performances. That seems fair to me. I would not call the playing here any exhibition of ultimate refinement in the manner of Michelangeli or of Gould, but this is not music that requires anything of that kind.
The 31 pieces here are very unpretentious. Only one lasts longer than four minutes, and nearly half of them clock out after less than two. The harmony is almost entirely tonal (after some Stravinskyish assertiveness at the start of the very first number), and most of the recital consists of items that seem to have started life as improvisations. Nine numbers go by that title explicitly, and if they don't seem to be one's normal idea of improvisation, having more thematic content than I for one would have expected, that may simply reflect the fact that Poulenc was an outstandingly gifted improviser. The suite Soirees de Nazelles with which Roge opens the recital is reported to have originated in pieces that he improvised at some kind of informal Schubertiads during his residency there, and they also have more substance than show about them.
The sense of improvisation is strengthened in the Nazelles suite by what sounds to me like an unmistakable allusion in the Preamble and again in the Cadence to Bach's Chromatic Fantasia, itself highly improvisatory in manner. Allusiveness in general is another strong characteristic of these works. There is an explicit Homage to Schubert and another to Edith Piaf, for instance. Poulenc was closely associated with Stravinsky, and while I can't hear much of Stravinsky in the three `perpetual motion' works as the liner-note writer tells me I should, I hear him loud and clear in the Preamble to the Nazelles suite. Nor do I think it unduly speculative to detect the influence of Schumann in the finale to the same suite, and while the attractive melody of the Valse may of course be Poulenc's own something leads me to doubt it.
Above all what these miniatures recall to me is Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words. This is not a matter of specific allusions or of the musical idiom, it's just a matter of the overall impression created. They show the same kind of variety and resourcefulness within a fairly restricted range of expression, and the harmonisation is also, with a couple of exceptions, cautious and unadventurous as Mendelssohn's tended to be - there is no experimentation in the manner of Faure, still less that of Debussy or Ravel. For all that, these works have real character and personality, and they are thoroughly agreeable and companionable, even striking a distinctly deeper note in the Pastorale from the Three Pieces. The `variations' in the Nazelles suite are not variations as Franck or Bizet (or any of the German masters) used that expression, more a little collection of miniature tone-poems, and you may be relieved to learn that the three `perpetual-motion' works are hardly that at all - one toccata is quite enough for me. I would rather not get into the topic of the Satie-style names for the `variations', an issue for which `tiresome' would be a restrained characterisation.
Roge's playing suits the music very well. The first `improvisation' and of course the toccata call for a bit of virtuosity, which he is not short of. Otherwise the technical demands seem generally fairly moderate, the real requirement being to capture the intimate and `off-duty' feel of the music which, as the Gramophone critics said, he does very well. The sound comes over very agreeably too, in part through Roge's tactful and sympathetic pedalling, in part from the acoustic, but above all, of course, from the player's touch.
The liner-note is short and fairly basic, but fine as far as it goes. All in all, this is a very pleasant disc that can be commended in good conscience to all but the most ultra-conservative listeners. I am very pleased to have spotted it, and very happy too to endorse the acclamation it was given in 1988.
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Summary: A Delight
Comment: There's little use looking further for a recording of Poulenc's piano music, not when Pascal Roge captures the elegance, charm, and wit of his countryman's art so well. The disc starts with "Les Soirees de Nazelles," where some of Poulenc's more virtuosic passages lie. Also demanding are some of the "Improvisations." I find both of these works the most stimulating works on the disc, though my favorite single piece may well be the "Pastourelle," a piano reduction of a work Poulenc wrote for "L'Evential de Jeanne," a collaborative ballet from the 1920s. It capsulizes the sophisticated wit that marks Poulenc as perhaps the drollest of France's Les Six.
Roge is fully attuned to the more virtuosic moments as well as to the humor and verve of Poulenc's idiom. And Decca, often maligned for their inability to turn out consistently fine piano recordings, has here produced a model sound recording. Maybe it's the venue, a London church, that contributes just the right degree of warmth and detracts not a whit from the clean, powerful tone of Roge's piano.
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