Poulenc - Les Animaux modeles, Sinfonietta, etc.
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Label: Chandos
Cat No: CHSA5260
Format: Hybrid SACD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Orchestral
Release Date: 4th November 2022
Contents
Works
L'Eventail de Jeanne » no.8 Pastourelle
Les Animaux modelesLes Maries de la Tour Eiffel
» La Baigneuse de Trouville
» Le Discours du General
SinfoniettaArtists
BBC Concert OrchestraConductor
Bramwell ToveyWorks
L'Eventail de Jeanne » no.8 Pastourelle
Les Animaux modelesLes Maries de la Tour Eiffel
» La Baigneuse de Trouville
» Le Discours du General
SinfoniettaArtists
BBC Concert OrchestraConductor
Bramwell ToveyAbout
When we recorded this album, in March 2022, no-one could have imagined that it would be Bramwell Tovey’s last recording. Chandos Records would like to dedicate this recording to the memory of Bramwell Tovey, with whom the company had collaborated for over a decade; a versatile musician highly accomplished as both a composer and a conductor, immensely personable and humorous, who possessed an innate understanding of the qualities of his fellow orchestral musicians and quickly earned their respect and devotion. He shall be very sorely missed.
Tovey and the BBC Concert Orchestra capture the wit and charm of Poulenc’s music perfectly. Each piece sizzles with excitement, and the well-known pieces (the Sinfonietta and ballet Les Animaux modèles) are beautifully complemented by less frequently heard miniatures: ‘La Baigneuse de Trouville’ and ‘Discours du général’ from Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel and ‘Pastourelle’ from L’Éventail de Jeanne. Recorded in Surround Sound, the album is available as a Hybrid SACD.
Tovey and the BBC Concert Orchestra capture the wit and charm of Poulenc’s music perfectly. Each piece sizzles with excitement, and the well-known pieces (the Sinfonietta and ballet Les Animaux modèles) are beautifully complemented by less frequently heard miniatures: ‘La Baigneuse de Trouville’ and ‘Discours du général’ from Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel and ‘Pastourelle’ from L’Éventail de Jeanne. Recorded in Surround Sound, the album is available as a Hybrid SACD.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Sinfonietta. I. Allegro con fuoco
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2Sinfonietta. II. Molto vivace
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3Sinfonietta. III. Andante cantabile
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4Sinfonietta. IV. Finale
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5La Baigneuse de Trouville (No. 4 from 'Maries de la Tour Eiffel')
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6Discours du General (No. 3 from 'Maries de la Tour Eiffel')
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7Pastourelle (No. 8 from 'L'Éventail de Jeanne')
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8Les Animeux Modèles. I. Le petit jour
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9Les Animeux Modèles. II. L'Ours et les deux Compagnons
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10Les Animeux Modèles. III. La Cigale et la Fourmi
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11Les Animeux Modèles. IV. Le Lion amoureux
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12Les Animeux Modèles. V. L'homme entre deux âges et ses deux maîtresses
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13Les Animeux Modèles. VI. La mort et le bucheron
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14Les Animeux Modèles. VII. Les deux Coqs
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15Les Animeux Modèles. VIII. Le repas de midi
Europadisc Review
In March this year, just four months before his untimely death a day after his 69th birthday, the conductor Bramwell Tovey made what would be his final recording. Together with the BBC Concert Orchestra – of which he was principal conductor from 2018 – he recorded for Chandos a scintillating programme of lesser-known orchestral music by Francis Poulenc. Tovey’s career, both as a performing musician and as a composer, was wide-ranging, encompassing appearances as tuba player with the London Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s, early conducting posts with London Festival Ballet, Scottish Ballet and Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, and an unprecedented 18-year tenure as music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Beloved of audiences and musicians for his musical acuity as well as his personable and humorous character, he will – as the dedication of this final disc states – be sorely missed.
Poulenc’s music serves as a rather appropriate swansong: the ballet Les Animaux modèles (1940–42) harks back to Tovey’s early career roots, and wears its underlying seriousness lightly, while the other main work, the Sinfonietta (1947–48) was an early commission for the BBC Third Programme (now Radio 3). In between are three shorter items composed in the 1920s for collaborative ventures by members of Les Six. Tovey and his musicians are totally at ease in this repertoire, combining elegance, a sharply focussed wit and unfailing musicianship in uncommonly satisfying performances.
The disc opens with Poulenc’s Sinfonietta, originally commissioned by Edward Lockspeiser as a fifteen-minute work for small orchestra. Work on the score took longer than intended, during the course of which it grew to almost twice the intended length and became, as the composer himself admitted, more a symphony than a sinfonietta. Eventually premiered on 28 October 1948 by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Roger Désormière as part of an all-French programme, it bursts with that focused energy so typical of the mature Poulenc, and a frequently sardonic wit, but it also has moments of richly expansive lyricism. The BBC Concert Orchestra sound as though they’re enjoying themselves tremendously under Tovey’s sure-footed direction, not least in those moments of light-hearted Gallic reflectiveness that pepper the score. And the way they point the lively figuration of the scherzo-like second movement is simply delicious, as is their more relaxed mien in the Andante cantabile third movement, with gorgeous layers of shading. There’s a Stravinsky-like spikiness to the opening of the Finale, but coupled with a very French sensuality, and the humour of the surprise ending is perfectly caught.
Poulenc was dismissive of his contributions to the collaborative ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921), but Tovey and his musicians enter into the spirit of the work with Poulenc’s two numbers: the humour of the ‘Discours du général’ is, it’s true, rather laboured, but ‘La Baigneuse de Trouville’ – a musical picture of a saucy postcard – crackles along with a beguiling mixture of fun and sensuality. Far better known (albeit in its piano version) is the ‘Pastourelle’ Poulenc composed for another ballet, the ambitious ten-composer joint venture L’Eventail de Jeanne (1927). The advantages of hearing it in its orchestral form – particularly the marvellously characterful woodwind writing – are abundantly evident in this performance.
The other main work on the disc is the ballet Les Animaux modèles (‘The Model Animals’), inspired by the Fables of La Fontaine familiar throughout France, and designed not as an excuse to dress up in animal costumes but rather as a ‘symbolic’ ballet, in a rural French setting. All the more remarkable is the fact that this affectionate and perceptive 40-minute score was composed by Poulenc after his demobilisation, amid the dark days of the Nazi occupation. He included in the work allusions to French popular sentiment that would have flown over the heads of the uniformed German officers and their secretaries that made up the audience of the premiere at the Paris Opéra on 8 August 1942, yet would have been keenly felt by any native listeners.
Les Animaux modèles is a work that manages to be simultaneously homely and subversive, and it includes some of Poulenc’s most brilliantly orchestrated music, including the radiant opening sunrise, the swooning lines of ‘The Amorous Lion’, the fast-paced ‘Middle-aged Man and His Two Mistresses’, and the deceptively mounting intensity of ‘Death and the Woodcutter’ (for fellow composer Arthur Honegger, ‘probably the high-point of the score’). Including some of La Fontaine’s most popular Fables, the ballet’s transporting apotheosis has its foundation in an underlying tenderness that is uniquely French. Tovey and the musicians of the BBC Concert Orchestra are masterly at highlighting the various strands that characterise this multi-faceted, underrated score, arguably the first in which Poulenc demonstrated his full independence of earlier models.
It’s hard to think of a finer tribute to Bramwell Tovey than this sumptuously recorded disc (in surround sound, for those who have it), and it comes complete with extensive and informative booklet notes by Nigel Simeone as well as Poulenc’s original synopsis for Les Animaux modèles. Both as a souvenir of Tovey’s unfailing musicality and good humour, and as a showcase for some of Poulenc’s lesser known scores, it’s a winner on every count.
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