Francis Poulenc - Les Biches Suite, FP 36b

"Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) wrote 'Les Biches' in 1923 as a ballet for Serge Diaghilev and his 'Ballet Russe'. It was premiered in 1924 with sets by Marie Laurencin. The Choreography was by Nijinska. The ballet scenario was essentially surrealist in the sense that it was, in Milhaud’s words, the result of 'full fantasy' unencumbered by the usual conscious effort 'to describe, to suggest, to express, to comment upon'. The blurring of the distinctions between reality and imagination and between logic and fantasy was an explicit intention of 'Les Biches'. Even its title mirrored the inextricable unity inherent in language use. The title directly exploded the surface appearance of contradiction. It refers at one and the same time to hind, the female deer, and darling. In line with the surrealists’ defense of 'automatic' writing and free association, the title came to Poulenc spontaneously in a taxi. The ballet was decidedly erotic and playful.

The set of 'Les Biches' might be compared profitably with a surrealist canvas, particularly Magritte’s 'Le Monde Invisible' ['The Invisible World'] (1954) and 'La Chambre d’Ecoute' ['The Listening Room'] (1952). The background was all white and the only object on stage was an enormous blue sofa. The revelation of the seemingly limited meaning of objects was achieved in the ballet through the use of the blue sofa changing character. The penetration of the distinction between the seen and the unseen and the alteration of the idea of the visible occurred through sudden changes created by turning the sofa around and using it as a mobile character. The subject of the ballet, if there was one, was sexual pleasure.

The ballet score launched Poulenc’s career. The music has been compared with Stravinsky’s 'Pulcinella' from 1920 because of Poulenc’s evident use of 18th-and early 19th-century musical forms and gestures. The work is a suite of events It presents a mix of styles, parody, rapid contrast, interpolations of jazz elements, allusions to the past, and clear appropriations. Like pictorial surrealism, it avoided a modernist surface. Rather it used easily grasped musical events—the simple and familiar—in order to jettison established associations between music and experience. The work is like a surrealist word-game which employs recognizable musical images in humorous but provocative and psychologically penetrating ways. Cocteau noted, 'I doubt whether this music knows it hurts'. As in surrealist painting there is, as Nancy Perloff has observed, a 'tragic sound lurking beneath the tuneful surface'. In 1939, Poulenc reorchestrated the ballet and produced the orchestral suite performed in this concert."

—Leon Botstein


Date: 1939-1940
Catalog: FP 36b
Dedicatee: Misia Sert
Order:
No. 1 - Rondeau: 0:08
No. 2 - Adagietto: 3:27
No. 3 - Rag-Mazurka: 7:16
No. 4 - Andantino: 13:01
No. 5 - Finale: 16:15

Performers:
Jean-Luc Tingaud as conductor
National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland


Note: This channel does not own the score or audio, and they are only used for non-commercial purposes. This video is a reupload from Thomas van Dun, who withdrew all score videos of pieces not composed by himself.

Original Uploader’s Channel:    / thomasvandun