Music department celebrates Poulenc with festival

The Cornell Department of Music presents three concerts this week celebrating Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), one of the century's most versatile composers, having to his credit operas and ballets, keyboard concertos, choral works, songs, piano pieces and chamber music.

The first concert, focusing on chamber music for winds, is April 14 at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall, and the second concert, with music for choir, organ and orchestra, is April 16 at 8 p.m. in Sage Chapel. The final concert, April 18 at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall, recreates a performance given by Poulenc on the Cornell campus in 1960. The festival is free and open to the public.

Poulenc is known particularly for vocal music that matches the natural cadences of the French language; for his light, idiomatic woodwind chamber music; and for a style that, although perceptibly modern, is enjoyable to listeners with conservative tastes.

The first concert with the Sonata for flute and piano, performed by flutist Liisa Ambegaokar Grigorov and Xak Bjerken. Ithaca College School of Music faculty members Paige Morgan (oboe) and Lee Goodhew (bassoon) join Bjerken for the composer's Trio for piano, oboe and bassoon. Following intermission, guest tenor Thomas Young sings Tel jour telle nuit ("Such a day, such a night"). The nine poems that constitute the cycle are taken from a collection by Paul Eluard titled Les yeux fertiles. The concert closes with Poulenc's Suite Française, scored for harpsichord and winds. Mark Davis Scatterday conducts the Cornell Chamber Winds with harpsichordist David Yearsley.

The April 16 concert, conducted by director of choral activities Scott Tucker, explores four of Poulenc's works written for religious settings. The Litanies à la Vierge Noir is scored for women's voices and organ. The Organ Concerto, the most serious of his concertos, was completed in August 1938 on a commission from the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, to whom it is dedicated. It will be performed by University Organist Annette Richards with members of the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra. Other works on the program are Laudes de Saint Antoine de Padoue and Gloria, which features soprano and festival director Judith Kellock, the Cornell University Chorus and Glee Club and the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra.

The April 18 concert recreates a performance given on Feb. 28, 1960, in the Statler Auditorium by Francis Poulenc and Denise Duval, the soprano who created the role of The Woman in La Voix Humaine.

"It seemed fitting to commemorate their visit 40 years ago as we conclude the celebration of Poulenc's centenary year, 1999," said Kellock.

The first half of the program is performed by Rebecca Ferguson, a graduate student in musicology who studies with Kellock, and pianist Blaise Bryski, a doctoral student in performance practice. They begin with the Recitative and Air of Lia from Debussy's "The Prodigal Son" and follow with two songs from the cycle Shéhérazade and the Air from L'Heure Espagnole, all compositions of Maurice Ravel. Ferguson and Bryski close their set with two Poulenc songs, A sa guitare and Air champêtre from the cycle Airs chantés.

The entire second half of the program is devoted to one work, La Voix Humaine, a lyric tragedy in one act based on a text by Jean Cocteau. Poulenc was clear about his wish that his stage works be performed in the vernacular of the audience, and so the opera "The Human Voice" will be sung in English, translated by Edward Murray and Kellock for their Ithaca Opera performance in 1995. Performed by Kellock and pianist Patrick Hansen, director of the opera program at Ithaca College, the opera is a tour de force in which a soprano, alone on stage, sings into a telephone to a lover who is abandoning her.