Poulenc’s Lovely Brush With Seriousness

Francis Poulenc seldom got respect during his lifetime. He claimed--at times, protesting too much--that he never wanted or courted it, preferring to puncture artistic pretensions rather than assuming them himself.

He was “serious” music’s great joker of the 1930s and ‘40s, Satie being his nominal god, and his signature piece the 1932 cantata “Le bal masque,” to the nonsense lyrics of Max Jacob, emblematic of the bad boy’s contempt for good manners and tradition.

But--to oversimplify and compress-- Poulenc underwent a sort of spiritual conversion in the 1950s precipitated by the composer’s guilty, painfully anxious relationship with a much younger man.

“Dialogues des Carmelites,” created during that troubled time, is arguably the composer’s serious masterpiece, all the more remarkable for having been written in a style incorporating so many of the stylistic features that made earlier songs, piano pieces and “Le bal masque” the comic gems that they are.

Poulenc remained to the end the most ardent of tonalists, a creator of sensual melodies and lively rhythms, distinctive despite roots in Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev and the French Baroque.

“Carmelites” is the summing-up, at once masterfully setting and transcending George Bernanos’ austere text. The plot deals, in tellingly swift, incisive tableaux, with the conflicts and ultimate martyrdom of a group of Carmelite nuns at the frenzied height of the French Revolution, singing the seraphic “Salve Regina” against a harsh, seemingly unrelated counter-melody from the rabble, as they march slowly, ecstatically, to the guillotine.

It is a work of crushingly potent simplicity, in its music and dramaturgy.

The opera’s one previous recording, with Pierre Dervaux conducting the cast of the first French staging in 1957 (the world premiere was given at La Scala several months earlier), remains a superb accomplishment in its CD reincarnation (EMI 749331, two discs).

The just-released second recording (Virgin Classics 7592272, 2 CDs), a worthy successor, re-creates the recent Lyon Opera production conducted by Kent Nagano.

In comparing the two, it’s difficult to escape the feeling of greater heat in the EMI original--the sort of thing that usually results from the performers’ first flush of enthusiasm at being involved in the creation of an important work of art.

There is greater subtlety of expression from the podium in the energetic but more dynamically varied, more slowly and variously paced Nagano reading.

If Virgin’s central players--Catherine Dubosc and Rachel Yakar as young Blanche de la Force and the worldly prioress, Mme. Lidoine--do not reach the peaks of passionate intensity achieved by their EMI predecessors, Denise Duval and Regine Crespin, there is compensating variety of expression in their work.

In either version, the strong ensemble required to create a believable picture of this seemingly hermetic religious community is brilliantly achieved.

If Virgin has any slight advantage it is in the powerful characterizations of the intrusive outsiders, Blanche’s brother and father, sung respectively--and with thrilling urgency--by Jean Luc Viala and Jose van Dam.

More important than the superiority of one edition to the other (an impossible choice) is making--or renewing--acquaintance with this singularly touching, lovely work of modern musical theater.

And for as illuminating a look as we’re ever had of the other, more familiar Poulenc--the snot-nosed urchin--try the aforementioned “Bal masque,” given the virtuosic ride of its life by the astonishingly versatile Van Dam, with Nagano leading a crack ensemble of first-chair players from the Lyon Opera Orchestra.

While “Bal masque” alone merits the acquisition of the disc (Virgin 59236), there’s more treasure here: the starkly dramatic “Jedermann” monologues (1943) by Frank Martin, and two works commissioned for Georg Pabst’s 1932 “Don Quixote” film with Feodor Chaliapin in the title role--Jacques Ibert’s “Quatre Chansons” (which was selected) and Ravel’s immeasurably superior “Don Quichotte a Dulcinee” (rejected)--all sung with rare intelligence, wit and solidity of tone by the amazing Van Dam.