Poulenc: The Joker Gets Serious

Mention the name Francis Poulenc and the image of a musical wiseacre is summoned up. But within even his jokiest music--particularly that written after World War II, when Poulenc was further from the influence of Stravinsky--there runs a rich vein of sentimentality, expressed in a chromatic melodiousness more akin to that found in French pop ballads than in, say, Ravel.

Those melodies in coexistence with “modernist” motor rhythms make Poulenc’s style uniquely winsome to some ears, anathema to more sober sensibilities.

Interestingly, the serious side--as exemplified in two operas from the 1950s, “Dialogues des Carmelites” and “La Voix humaine,” which faded from view shortly after their premieres--has been revived with some frequency on European and American stages recently and seems to be finding a receptive audience. This has everything to do with both being eminently accessible--musically and dramatically. No scary modern stuff here. The flint-hearted critic might even accuse them of being simplistic.

“Voix humaine” is the trickier of the two to stage and perform, a setting of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 “monodrama” of the same name and the subject of an obscure short film Roberto Rossellini made for Anna Magnani 20 years later. In any form or language, it’s a one-woman show, in which a “young and elegant” person spends three-quarters of an hour speaking on her bedroom telephone, mainly to the man who is in the process of dumping her.

Poulenc masterfully manipulates--it’s the appropriate word, for better and worse--Cocteau’s text to wring from it the last drop of theatricality.

The single role is a star turn. The Woman, as she is simply called, is going elegantly to pieces to the tune of gorgeous chromatic harmonies and shrewdly contrived dynamics, including the particularly effective employment of pregnant silences.

Whether one appreciates the text as such or not, Poulenc didn’t miss a trick--or a sentiment--in setting it, as Cocteau was the first to admit. Poulenc might, then, be considered a sort of higher-brow Andrew Lloyd Webber.

If this, to paraphrase Noel Coward, is cheap music, it’s very potent cheap music when sung and acted as it was by the role’s creator in 1957, Denise Duval, the recently deceased French singing actress and Poulenc’s operatic muse.

Her fabulous 1959 recording of the work was, unpardonably, allowed to slip from the catalogue after only about a year’s availability on compact disc. But, until its return, there’s much to admire in the strongest recorded effort on the score’s behalf since Duval’s.

The Woman in the latest version (Harmonia Mundi 901474) is soprano Francoise Pollet, whose success is in large part attributable to her not attempting, unlike her predecessors, to duplicate or even suggest Duval’s richly faceted, decidedly stagey interpretation.

Pollet’s is more flat-out operatic work: less subtle, less complex than Duval’s and delivered with a bigger, darker voice than her predecessor’s. The newcomer thus seems less vulnerable and ultimately, when she acknowledges the end of the affair, more heroic in defeat. One can’t imagine Duval’s recovery, whereas Pollet’s is a certainty.

Pollet’s strength is matched here by the powerful orchestral framework provided by the Orchestre National de Lille under the direction of Jean-Claude Casadesus, which is less flickery, more Wagnerian (Brunnhilde, in peignoir, on the telephone?) than Georges Pretre’s for Duval.

Turning to Poulenc’s nominally humorous Concerto for Two Pianos (1932) and his Piano Concerto of 1949 is less of a shock than might be expected. It doesn’t really make that much difference which Poulenc one listens to: The serious relief to the concertos’ comic atmosphere bears more than passing resemblance to much of what you hear in these tragic operas.

The concertos are available in handsome new recorded editions from Pascal Roge, who delivers both--with Silviane Deferne his equal in the double concerto--with dry, energetic wit and the requisite sentimental indulgence, too. Conductor Charles Dutoit and the Philharmonia Orchestra provide ideally alert, flashing accompaniments (London 436 546).

The program is rounded out by the darker, less slick, but hardly less accessible Organ Concerto of 1938, in which the stylish soloist is Peter Hurford.