Poulenc: Complete Music for Wind Instruments and Piano - Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Charles Wadsworth

FRANCIS POULENC LINER NOTES

With their deaths comes an altering of traditions on how music should or should not be composed and performed; prejudices and persuasions waver, become secondhand, third hand, and Poulenc settles into new perspective. Hearing the woodwind catalog in one fell swoop forces me to realize that though each piece is foolproof, they're all the same. The sameness is stressed not because the language is ever unchanged (which it is, and so it was too with Chopin), but because there are no conversations, no argument, no strain. All players are in accord at all times. The two clarinets, the piano and oboe, the bassoon and horn, do not have separate personalities, they are clones nodding at each other. Is the sameness perhaps less trying in the vocal music where the tunes are quite simply more solid and contagious? Still, he never changed his tune throughout his life. During the final years Poulenc often said that he wished he were 20 again so as to take Boulez on his own terms. But if Poulenc's serial forays -- C Major pointillisms, he called them -- were more laughable than, say, Stravinsky's, it could be argued that Webern was there for the asking for both men, long before Boulez was born. I truly do feel that with passing time, just as various creators of other centuries now appear homogenized to us as they did not to themselves, so Webern and Poulenc like distant stars will eventually merge. But the brightness will come from Poulenc. -From notes by Ned Rorem