declassified

parisian concert

Modernist Paris—Poulenc, Franck and Fauré

June 10, 2007
Sunday @ 3:00 p.m.

Tickets:
$10 per person

Presenting Sponsor: Viking Bank
2006-2007 Media Sponsor: Bainbridge Island Review

Modernism in French music has its roots in the coexistence of conservative and avant-garde impulses that made the Paris of the 1880s so colorful and complex.  When he wrote his brilliant, one-of-a-kind Violin Sonata in 1886, César Franck had assimilated the accomplishments of Berlioz and Wagner, but in this very pure piece of music he points the way to the end of the century not by invoking mythology, but with a nod to Mozart, Brahms and Bach (whose work Franck, the greatest church organist of his time, had done so much to revive in his attempt to restore seriousness and dignity to the role of music in the Catholic liturgy).

Gabriel Fauré, younger by two decades, also received conservative training and was a liturgical organist; his Requiem of 1888 remains his most famous work.  But from 1890 on he cultivated the acquaintance of the eccentric poets of the Symbolist movement and set some of the finest lyrics of the decade to music almost before the ink was dry.  Fauré contribution to today’s program is the Trio for Violin, Violoncello & Piano of 1923.

Francis Poulenc, who was born in 1899 and lived until 1963, is the one of the three composers who took part in the cultural “life-style” in which it was generally the Russians and Spaniards like Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Picasso, who were in the headlines.  More than any French composer of note, Poulenc embraced iconoclastic art, modern dance, smoke-filled bars, gossipy love-affairs, left-wing politics and of course the jazz that began to infiltrate Parisian nightlife after 1918.  The program begins with his Sextet for Woodwinds & Piano, completed in 1932 and reworked on the eve of World War Two.

Featured performers are Kate Kralik, flute; Amy Duerr-Day, oboe; Patti Beasley, clarinet; Don Warkentin, horn; Judy Lawrence, bassoon; Thomas Monk and Peggy Spencer, violin; Zon Eastes, violoncello; and Mary Foster Grant and James Quitslund, piano.