Piano Sonata for four hands

Growing up in affluent surroundings—his father was head of the largest chemical corporation in France—Françis Poulenc could easily have been a dilettante. Musical talent passed to Poulenc from his mother, and by his late teens he was already making a name in Parisian circles of new music. Even before receiving his first formal composition lessons, Poulenc was associated with a loose-knit group of composers known Les Six (The Six) who admired Satie, Cocteau and new Dadaist trends in art. His music explores mimicry of past styles, sometimes including direct quotations from Mozart and others, and in general maintains a freshness and verve that are aurally apparent. But in 1936 he experienced a mystical breakthrough while mourning the death of a colleague, and from then onward a renewed devotion to Roman Catholicism stimulated an outpouring of more introverted compositions.
The Sonata for Piano Four-Hands, despite revisions by the composer in 1939, remains a work of his youth. When it was written in June 1918, Poulenc was still a teenager: fresh-faced and wealthy, the toast of Left Bank modernists, occasionally going AWOL from military service amid the waning days of the Great War. Poulenc was in the audience a few years previously when Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused a literal riot to break out; the primitive, rhythmically-motivated aesthetic behind Rite appears in the Sonata's opening Prelude. Still, Poulenc's innate melodic sense tempers the propulsion with passages of tender simplicity, a feeling which governs the middle movement. The finale summarizes the preceding movements, at one moment even playing the principal ideas of the Prelude and Rustique at the same time. It is undeniably a work of great talent, and its glib conclusion reminds us of the composer's youthful caprice.

(c) Jason Stell