Concerto in G Minor for Organ, Strings and Timpani
performed Dec 8, 2002

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) has been called both a monk and a street urchin, because his music swung between extremes of impudent irony and devout religion. He won special favor for his entertaining suites, miniatures and attractive concertante works. His temperament preferred elegance to profundity. For years, he was pigeonholed as the playboy of French music.

Poulenc was born into money and had a privileged social position. He began his piano studies with his mother-an accomplished performer-at the age of five. Through his second piano teacher, Ricardo Viñes, he gained access to the fashionable Parisian artistic scene, and became a member of a group of iconoclastic young composers called Le Six, (Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, and Tailleferre), who, spearheaded by the writer Jean Cocteau, rejected not only the inflated Romanticism of Wagner but also what they regarded as the imprecision of Debussy and Ravel.

It was this life of renegade and privilege that inspired the majority of Poulenc's works. But there was also a dark side to Poulenc's personality, and in the 1930s a series of disastrous love affairs and the death of a friend, the composer-critic Pierre Octave-Ferroud, precipitated a return to the Catholic Church and a spate of powerful religious works.

Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Timpani (1938) was commissioned by American-born Princess Edmond de Polignac, heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, capable organist, and patroness of the parts. Poulenc, with no skills as an organist, sought advice from Maurice Duruflé regarding the solo part. The Organ Concerto is in seven continuous sections, formally approximating to a baroque fantasia, though on a larger scale.