Poemes a 4 strophes full#

One finds oneself wandering her sentences like Dante on his way to Heaven.

This openness to experience is replicated in the expansive syntax of these poems. O let me in.” The struggle is on for the soul of this poor soul, and only when everything in the cosmos (and the dictionary) is let in will she be at peace. your drinking water straight from the stream, /.

Keats, of course, is one of her many co-conspirators in this late night jam, and indeed in “Ode on My Nightingale” her “little god” tells us, “I am the cosmologist / of the atomic, high priest of everything / you never wanted to be. Ostensibly a book of odes, these are not just poems of praise she urges her readers to construe the term “ode” in the widest possible sense: as a “poetic stance, a poetic investigation of what it means to be a human being at any moment in time.” In fact, as Robert Orledge has shown, Koechlin taught Poulenc a great deal, but the younger composer preferred his earlier Le bestiaire style, and saw his Koechlin period, perhaps unfairly, as a deviation from his ‘natural’ self.How to describe a book as filled with delights as Barbara Hamby’s Holoholo. He felt in retrospect that the influence of Charles Koechlin, his teacher at the time, was not beneficial. So why are these Ronsard songs so seldom sung? Perhaps because the composer himself consistently gave them a bad press, and more or less renounced them. It was also not every twenty-five-year-old who could persuade Picasso to design a cover, a Klee-like design with lines and dots in the shape of a viol or lute. The dying Fauré had also intended to contribute a song to that collection.Īfter the success of the ballet Les biches in Monte Carlo in 1924 Poulenc was already a celebrity, and the fame of each of these songs’ dedicatee-singers demonstrates that the composer already stood at the centre of Parisian music-making. Poulenc set these poems during the four-hundredth anniversary of Ronsard’s birth, but not early enough in 1924 to feature in the special Ronsard number of La revue musicale featuring newly commissioned settings of the poet by Dukas, Roussel, Caplet, Honegger, Delage and Ravel. In Johnson’s words, Poulenc’s music 'has seemed dark and joyous, accessible and remote, imperishable yet infinitely fragile, and now it is in the hands of a younger generation’ () These songs will comfort the most jaded of palates, and this box set contains enough riches to sustain a lifetime’s listening.

Poemes a 4 strophes full#

Johnson’s accessible, comprehensive notes deserve to be published in book form, and Hyperion generously provide full texts and translations. A wonderful bonus is the inclusion of a 1970s BBC taping of Babar, narrated with impeccable grace and wit by Poulenc’s long-time recital partner Pierre Bernac. There’s not a weak link among the vocal cast, and there’s even a cameo from the great Felicity Lott. The Huit chansons polonaises, sung by Agnieszka Adamczak, pay oblique homage to Poulenc’s beloved Chopin. Soprano Susan Bickley is superb in Poulenc’s early Poèmes de Ronsard-sparky settings of Renaissance poetry, and Ashley Riches has fun with the better-known Chansons gaillardes. ‘Especially enjoyable is the final disc, subtitled Fancy.