Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) 

Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano (1924-1926) 

• Presto 

• Andante 

• Rondo 

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)  

Ma Mère l'Oye (1908; arrangement J. Linckelmann) 

• Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant 

• Petit Poucet 

• Laideronette, Impératrice des Pagodes
  Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête 

• Le jardin feérique 

Jean Francaix (1912-1997)  

L'heure du Berger (1947) 

• Les Vieux Beaux 

• Pin-up Girls 

• Les petits nerveux 

Break 

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)  

Sonata for oboe and piano, op. 166 (1921) 

• Andantino 

• Allegretto 

• Molto allegro 

Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) 

Sarabande et Cortège (1942) 

Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)  

Mládi ("Youth") (1924) 

• Andante 

• Andante sostenuto 

• Vivace 

• Allegro animato 

End of concert approximately 10 p.m. 

From Poulenc to Janáček 

Into the nimble musical world of France stepped a German composer with a brisk pace around the middle of the nineteenth century. For a few years he lived in Paris and created a furor there with his early operas. His stature was not large but gigantic was his ambition: Richard Wagner.  

Later, when he had elaborated his ideas into compelling operas, he acted on the French public as a kind of divisive force: either you were for him or you were against him. For example, the famous poet Baudelaire idolized Wagner, and he wrote a lyrical essay about him. Some French composers traveled in clubs of friends to Bayreuth to experience Tristan, Parsifal or the entire Ring . A veritable Wagner madness ensued that lasted a long time and had a lot of impact. But with others, Wagner met with enormous dislike. 

One of them was Francis Poulenc, born after Wagner's death and in everything his opposite. He had an aversion to Wagner's turgid language and his long arcs of tension. His own music was initially lighthearted, playful and mischievous, and he wrote appealing melodies that seemed to emerge from the French language itself. Listen, for example, to his agile Trio in which oboe, bassoon and piano run after each other, tumbling over each other and playing tag. In the lilting middle movement, you almost seem to understand the missing words. Not surprisingly, Poulenc indeed wrote a large number of songs, especially for the singer Pierre Bernac with whom he formed a song duo as pianist for many years. Bernac characterized his musical partner as follows: 'Poulenc liked to be the center of conversation, but he did so with such simplicity that no one was annoyed. And with his humor he made the most dry matters attractive.' In short: a delightful human being and a delightful composer of music where you are not bored for a moment. 

As a beginning composer, Poulenc was an amateur, and when he went looking for a composition teacher, Maurice Ravel was recommended to him. Ravel was charmed by Poulenc's music, but to his dismay, the already famous composer advised him to take a good listen to Saint-Saëns. Poulenc was stunned and thought, "That old fart? Is he still alive?' Probably Ravel lacked technical skill and refinement in the young Poulenc. For his part, Poulenc was not without enthusiasm for Ravel's music. Could it be that it was precisely with Ravel that Poulenc collided with an excess of skill and refinement? In any case, Ravel's Ma Mère L'Oye is an example of supreme refinement and mastery. Not a note in this score is too much, and Ravel's musical imagination immediately moves the listener into the fairy-tale world of Mother Goose.   

Ravel's opinion was also sought by the parents of Jean Françaix, a piano prodigy who composed from the age of six and never stopped. His possessed zeal resulted in more than two hundred works of high level and high entertainment content. Such as L'heure du Berger (perhaps an allusion to Debussy's famous Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune?) This work was not composed for the Concert Hall but for a brasserie as an entourage. That the piece did end up at Concert Hall is irony at its finest, and it requires of the players virtuosity as well as humor and lightheartedness.
 

Playfulness is not present in Saint-Saëns ' Oboe Sonata , written in the Last year of his life. It is a balanced and elegant work, written in neoclassical language reminiscent of the neoclassical works of his contemporary Picasso. When he was young, Saint-Saëns had contributed to the fame of Liszt and Wagner in France, but his interest in late Romanticism eventually gave way to a concentration on great examples from the Baroque and Classical periods. as evidenced in this oboe sonata, among others. 

In the approximately simultaneously written wind sextet Mládí ("Youth") by the seventy-year-old Janáček draws inspiration from an entirely different source. The idea to compose a work for winds probably came to Janácek in 1923 upon hearing a divertimento by the French composer Roussel. But then that idea was the only French thing about this score. With Janácek, there is no artful balance or elegance, but jumpiness and fantasy, and short musical phrases often based on phrases from the Czech language. Mládi is Janácek's only chamber music work for wind ensemble, but the score of his opera "The Cunning Little Fox," written shortly before, is full of passages for winds. The wind instruments there figure as the persons in the opera, and those persons are the animals of the forest where the playful and exciting life takes place. The short phrases that are constantly repeated, the rapid change of rhythm and metre, all this is reminiscent of the agile little fox from the opera. This wind quintet is best listened to with a fantasized forest full of animals in the listener's mind. 

Before Mládí, another work by French composer Henri Dutilleux, who died in 2013, is heard, who on the one hand was in the tradition of Debussy and Ravel but still managed to create his own distinctive style. His Sarabande et Cortège for bassoon and piano, with some lyrical melodies and furious passages, was the first of four graduation pieces for the Paris Conservatory (1942-1950). 

Katja Reichenfeld