Poulenc: Flute Sonata / Messiaen: Le Merle Noir / Boulez: Sonatine

Description

French Flute MusicPoulenc Messiaen Sancan Jolivet Dutilleux BoulezThe transverse flute had early importance in Frenchmusic, particularly after the technical changes in theinstrument towards the end of the seventeenth century. Itowes much of its relative prominence in French music ofthe twentieth century to the use made of it in orchestralcolouring by composers such as Debussy and Ravel andto the existence of a group of highly gifted playersassociated in one way or another with the ParisConservatoire.Francis Poulenc was one of the group of youngFrench musicians known in the 1920s as Les Six,influenced by the eccentric composer Erik Satie, andfriends of Jean Cocteau. His Sonata for flute and piano,a relatively late work, was written between December1956 and March 1957 in response to a commission fromthe Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, and dulydedicated to the memory of Mrs Coolidge. The firstperformance was given at the Strasbourg Festival inJune 1957 by the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal and thecomposer, and it was to become one of Poulenc's mostpopular works. In January his opera Dialogues desCarmelites had had its successful premi?¿re at La Scalain Milan, and he explained in a letter to his biographerHenry Hell that the writing in the sonata, simple butsubtle, had harmony recalling the novice SisterConstance in the opera. The first movement, markedAllegro malinconico, brings contrasts of mood, with aprincipal theme of essential poignancy. The secondmovement, Cantilena, brings a moving melody, theharmony and texture of the piano writing deceptive in itsapparent simplicity. The work ends with a rapid andcheerful Presto giocoso of similarly lucid clarity, itslively course briefly interrupted by a more pensivepassage.Olivier Messiaen is among the most influentialfigures in the music of the twentieth century. At firstalarming and shocking audiences, he later won anunassailable position, respected at home in France andabroad for his achievement through a musical languagethat is intensely personal, emotional and informed by adeep Catholic piety. His musical idiom was derivedfrom a number of sources, with an interest in bird-songthat is directly evident in his Oiseaux exotiques (ExoticBirds) and Catalogue d'oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds)and indirectly elsewhere in his music, in which hedeveloped a form of serialism that has been variouslyinterpreted. Le merle noir (The Blackbird), for flute andpiano, was written in 1951 as a test piece for the ParisConservatoire. After the the sustained notes of the pianohave died away, the flute plays a solo passage, itsinspiration derived from the song of the bird. The pianoenters with a phrase immediately echoed by the flute,extended and then returning after an episode recallingthe opening. The same material provides the basis forthe rapid final section.Pierre Sancan was for nearly thirty years a professorof piano at the Paris Conservatoire, while pursuing ahighly successful career as a performer. A winner of