20th Century French Music for Ensemble

Twentieth Century French Music for Ensemble

In 1935, the year of the Suite française and the Concertino da camera, Francis Poulenc reflected on the possibility of creating a personal musical language from elements already in circulation. Originality, as he understood it, could reside in the way those elements were brought together. This offers a useful point of departure for the present programme, in which inherited dances, the conventions of the concerto and the gestures of the theatre acquire their particular significance through the handling of instrumental voices. A melody can retain its outline while its harmonic surroundings change; a soloist can momentarily become an accompanist; a small scene can disclose an emotional weight disproportionate to its dimensions.

These questions can be approached through the varied history of French neoclassicism, a term whose meanings were already contested by the musicians and critics who used it between the wars. Appeals to older forms involved different understandings of expression, craftsmanship and the relationship between the present and the musical past. Relatively small forces allow changes of colour and function to become especially perceptible, and concision places considerable expressive responsibility on each exchange, interruption and return. Following these details reveals the individual decisions through which Poulenc, Ibert and Françaix shape musical continuity.

Poulenc’s Suite française d’après Claude Gervaise originated in the incidental music for Édouard Bourdet’s Margot in 1935. Its historical material therefore entered a theatrical situation from the outset. At Nadia Boulanger’s suggestion, Poulenc turned to sixteenth-century dances associated with Gervaise, available through Henry Expert’s modern edition. The scoring, combining oboes, bassoons, trumpets and trombones with percussion and harpsichord, gives this encounter between musical periods an audible presence, articulated through contrasting families of sound.

The Pavane provides an unusually revealing example of how Poulenc works within the borrowed material. Across successive phrases, the writing moves through F major, the Aeolian mode on D and parallel seventh chords whose motion loosens the usual connections of tonal harmony. Melodic coherence allows these harmonic perspectives to succeed one another without fragmenting the musical argument. The melodic line remains intelligible while its expressive implications shift, and Poulenc’s presence emerges in the changing relation between that line and the sounds supporting it. The past is experienced through a present ear, with its own habits of expectation and surprise.

This attention to relationship extends across the suite. Dance titles, a small military march, a lament and the concluding Carillon establish different kinds of movement and ceremony within a compact sequence. Repetition permits the listener to recognise a gesture while attending to changes in its presentation; contrast between sections supplies another source of proportion and direction. A drum roll in the opening Bransle de Bourgogne interrupts the succession of regular phrases before the final return. The Complainte follows a continuous, through-composed design, while the Carillon uses the recurring refrain of a rondo. The suite’s coherence consequently depends on the judgement with which its brief episodes are placed beside one another. Poulenc’s treatment of inherited music involves the timing of a return, the colouring of a familiar phrase and the expressive space allowed to each miniature.

Jacques Ibert’s Concertino da camera, also composed in 1935, approaches questions of scale and identity through the possibilities of the alto saxophone. Written for Sigurd Raschèr, it places the solo instrument with eleven players: six winds and a string quintet. Raschèr’s exploration of the saxophone’s upper register helped to enlarge the resources available to the composer, and the part moves between agile passagework and sustained melodic writing. The designation da camera is particularly apt because the soloist’s brilliance remains connected to the activity of identifiable instrumental partners.

In the opening Allegro con moto, accents displaced from the expected beat give the principal material its restless impetus. Thematic responsibility also shifts between the players. In one passage, the ensemble carries the second subject while the saxophone supplies a running semiquaver line around it. Melodic leadership and virtuoso display momentarily separate. This distinction between prominence and function is central to the work’s chamber character. Virtuosity participates in an exchange whose meaning depends on hearing both the solo line and what it enables the other instruments to say.

The work is organised in two movements, with the second joining a Larghetto to the concluding Animato molto. Its slow opening gives the saxophone an unaccompanied, recitative-like utterance before the ensemble enters. Material from this slow section generates the opening theme of the Animato, so that the change of pace transforms something the listener has already encountered. Later in the fast section, the cadenza gives the soloist greater freedom before the return of the opening material. Scholarship has offered differing accounts of the work’s relationship with jazz; its displaced accents, harmonic vocabulary and exploration of register can be understood more precisely by following their functions within the piece. A sustained phrase and a virtuoso passage disclose different capacities of the same instrumental voice.

Ibert had already explored a markedly different balance of forces in the Concerto pour violoncelle et orchestre d’instruments à vent of 1925. Here the cello is the only string instrument, surrounded by ten wind players. The scoring makes its individuality a feature of the entire musical texture: its capacity for sustained, inflected song is heard against a changing combination of woodwind and brass colours. Dedicated to Roland-Manuel, the concerto unfolds through a Pastorale, a Romance and a Gigue. Reviewing its first performance in February 1926, Paul Bertrand heard a concise, ironic reworking of the concerto, with the cello engaged in unexpectedly playful dialogue.

In the Pastorale, the apparent stability of G major is disturbed by the way instrumental lines are combined. At the return of the opening material, the oboe and cello affirm that tonal centre while the bassoon follows a different harmonic course. The effect arises from simultaneous perspectives within the ensemble: a familiar melody acquires a less settled meaning because of what accompanies it. In the Romance, the cello’s expressive latitude develops into a substantial cadenza, punctuated by recurring interventions from the winds. These interruptions make the relationship between individual utterance and collective response part of the movement’s form. Even the passage most closely associated with a soloist’s freedom remains engaged with the other players.

The Gigue brings this changing relationship into the sphere of dance. Its rapid compound metre sustains the motion, while successive episodes distribute the argument between the cello and the winds. A further cadenza, with harmonics and an insistently repeated chord, brings the cello’s virtuosity into sharper focus. Across the three movements, the cello leads, receives support and finds its direction altered by interventions.

The programme’s return to dance with Jean Françaix brings the theatre explicitly back into view. Les Malheurs de Sophie was composed as a ballet in 1935, to a scenario by George Flévitzky after the Comtesse de Ségur, and first staged at the Paris Opéra in 1948. The later suite, Sept danses, transfers selected scenes to ten wind instruments, with pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns.

The seven dances retain the outlines of a childhood world. Playing with the doll and its funeral are followed by the presentation of the young friends, Paul’s variation, the pas de deux between Sophie and Paul, tea and the dance of the butterfly nets. These titles establish changing relationships between an individual, a pair and a group, as well as the imaginative importance that a small object or event can assume. The tenderness of the pas de deux gives particular weight to the meeting of Sophie and Paul within the surrounding activity. Heard as a concert sequence, the dances invite attention to these changes of emotional scale: a brief scene is granted the time and character required to become an experience in its own right.

Françaix cultivated suites, ballets and variation sequences throughout his career, returning to forms in which ideas and rhythmic patterns could be reconsidered within a succession of short movements. His attachment to tonal language and traditional forms went together with an exact understanding of instrumental resources. Such continuity gives the listener a framework within which details can assume considerable importance. In the Sept danses, the movement from a doll’s funeral to a solo variation and a tender duet gives ceremony, individual character and intimacy a place within the same small world. Each episode acquires further meaning through its place in the sequence.

Across these works, recognisable musical gestures remain open to transformation through their surroundings. Poulenc lets a melodic line pass through different harmonic perspectives; Ibert makes changing instrumental relationships audible within the concerto; Françaix brings a sequence of small theatrical scenes into chamber music. The clarity of these works emerges from the care with which such relationships are composed. Attentive listening can follow the implications of a change in accompaniment, an interruption or a return, allowing an apparently familiar gesture to acquire a different meaning as the music proceeds.