Francis Poulenc - Nocturnes [With score]

Composer: Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) Performer: Alexandre Tharaud Recorded in: 1996 Eight Nocturnes for Piano solo, written in 1929-1938 00:00 - I. Sans traîner 03:05 - II. Très animé [Bal des jeunes filles] 04:22 - III. Modéré mais sans lenteur [Les cloches de Malines] 08:16 - IV. Lent, très las et piano [Bal fantôme] 09:49 - V. Presto misterioso [Phalènes] 11:06 - VI. Très calme mais sans traîner 14:40 - VII. Assez allant 16:38 - VIII. Très modéré [Pour servir de coda au cycle] Poulenc’s eight nocturnes span about a decade (1929-1938). Although they are often played separately, Poulenc created a cycle when he composed the eighth nocturne and gave it the title Pour servir de Coda au Cycle (To serve as Coda for the Cycle). Unlike Chopin’s or Fauré’s, Poulenc’s nocturnes are not romantic tone-poems. They are instead night-scenes and sound-images of public and private events. -The first Nocturne, in C major, acts as a prelude to the set. Composed in 1929, it is typically Poulenc – ­constructed out of a touching, almost child-like melodic pattern, with some Stravinskian style touches and a weird epilogue marked, le double plus lent. -The second Nocturne (1933) is entitled Bal de jeunes filles. The young girls, in Poulenc’s world, are indulging in a quadrille, a dance with both military and theatrical associations. According to Wilfrid Mellers, this Nocturne “is a delicious Poulenc image for the vulnerability of youth, perhaps even the vanity of human wishes“. In -1934 Poulenc published the Nocturnes, Nos. 3 to 6. The third Nocturne is entitled Les Cloches de Malines. Mellers sees this as a different kind of genre-piece “for it aurally depicts a small-town market-square that is probably, at dead of night, destitute of people. Bells toll through fourths between F and C, played by the left hand in equal crotchets but irregular metre, as though the mechanism is defective. It may well be, since the bells are very old, being in one of Poulenc’s “antique“ pieces – with the proviso that its world, however ancient, is still extant… the cacophony that eventually forms a brief middle section has a programmatic intention… perhaps the frantic clangings warn of some disaster, or maybe the clock’s works have gone crazy. In any case, we hear the raucous chaos in psychological as well as physical terms: the hubbub is the ills that flesh is heir to, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, things that go bump in the night.“ -The fourth Nocturne, Bal fantôme, carries a quotation by Julien Green: Pas une note des valses ou des scottisches ne se perdait dans toute la maison, si bien que le malade eut sa part de la fête et put rêver sur son grabat aux bonnes années de sa jeunesse (Not a note of the waltzes or the schottisches was lost in the whole house, so that the sick man shared in the festival and could dream on his death-bed of the good years of his youth). We are led by Pouleuc through an old-world, phantom ball where the chromatic harmony, sensuously spaced, moves us through a bygone-era waltz. It is dream-like, seductive and welcoming. -The fifth Nocturne is entitled Phalènes (Moths). In this Presto misterioso, Mellers hears the moths flickering in an irridescent bitonality. It is one of Poulenc’s more pictorial pieces – the coda is a quivering, sepulchral fragment of music, which Mellers feels may signal a human allegory: “we may be moths, jittering directionless:” -We are again outdoors for the sixth Nocturne. Mellers sees the work as “wafting through darkness“. -In the seventh Nocturne, our jeunes filles are back dancing or strolling on a balmy summer night. According to Mellers, “since the young girls are recalled in the seventh Nocturne (1935), it makes sense that Poulenc should round off the cycle with an epilogue.“ -The eighth Nocturne (1938) is designated Nocturne pour servir de Coda au Cycle. It begins with a tune close to that of the first Nocturne, but in 3/4 instead of 4/4. Mellers sees this as “a positive evolution… the music modulates flat wards ending on bare fifths of C, so the tonic C basic to the suite is reinstated, but not strongly affirmed. Fallibly human, Poulenc mistrusted definitive answers. This delectable suite of eight Nocturnes displays the loving care with which Poulenc defined, and protected, his vulnerabilities, even though they are less patent than those of the jeunes filles.“ Information: []