Double Concerto in D Minor
performed Apr 18, 2004

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 piano teacher Ricardo Vines 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 (mostly with younger men) 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 rated his Concerto for Two Pianos highly, "not so much for its intrinsic value as for the success of its orchestration," as he confided to Stephane Audel. It was commissioned from him in 1932 by the Princess Edmond de Polignac, the American-born patron and friend of some of the most famous composers of the twentieth century. Poulenc and Jacqes Février gave the work its premier on September 5 of the same year at the Venice Festival, with the La Scala Orchestra, conducted by Désiré Defauw. It was an instant success.