Chickens, Warthogs, and a Reluctant King

sing. Tonight marks the beginning of my week of rehearsals and performances for the Cabrillo Chorus’ annual holiday concert series, Music for the Feast of Christmas. Each year we sing a variety of short pieces, along with one longer work. That work this year is the Poulenc Gloria.

Poulenc looks like a nice guy, non?
[web photo: source]

The French composer Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) first came to fame as part of “Les Six,” a group of six young French composers inspired by Erik Satie. As described on this “Classical Notes” website, the group

specialized in brief piano pieces whose sweet and wistful lyricism belied such bizarre titles as “Things Seen From Right to Left Without Glasses,” “Limp Preludes for a Dog” and “Bureaucratic Sonata.” Les Six rejected wispy French impressionism along with both of the alternative trends of their time—the sobriety of composers who clung to the serious and comfortable forms of the past as well as modernists who crusaded for grating dissonance and intellectual structures that audiences couldn’t understand or enjoy. Instead, their goal was light, rhythmic and functional music, grounded in popular forms and leavened with wit.

My knowledge of Poulenc prior to singing the Gloria was fairly limited. I of course knew who he was, and I think I may have even performed some of his short works back when I was still playing the clarinet. Also, I know Robin is keen to see his opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites, the chilling ending of which we have watched several times on the Arts Channel.

Poulenc was a largely self-taught musician, and this shows in his works, which reflect a wide range of influences. The first time my chorus sang through the Gloria, I was impressed by how at one moment, the piece could sound all modern and edgy in a Stravinsky kind of way, and then twenty bars later we’d be swimming in a pool of Tchaikovsky lushness and romance.

I was also taken by Poulenc’s playfulness in the work. I mean, here is this mass, after all—usually a pretty darn serious thing—and his second movement (the “Laudamus te”) sounds like the soundtrack to a movie scene with kids playing tag in a school-yard at recess. (You can hear movement II here.)

Our director, Cheryl Anderson, is fond of employing colorful images when urging us to communicate the emotions of any given piece we’re working on. For this second movement, she told us: “Imagine you’re under the chicken coop, playing sand-castles with your cousins.” Pause. And then: “Not that I ever did that...”

Cheryl conducting us at a rehearsal for last year’s concert

My favorite movement of the Gloria is number 5, the “Dominus Deus, Agnus Dei.” It starts out with these jazzy, Gershwin-style chords, but quickly morphs into a Russian-sounding, Prokofiev-esque thing. And then the soprano solo voice rises up above the orchestra, and it just slays you. So ethereal and floating, but with completely unexpected notes and intervals. (Listen to movement V here—though I’m not crazy about the soprano in this version.)

The chorus enters a few bars later, intoning “Rex coelestis, Deus...” Cheryl cuts us off. “You’ve got to push him onto the throne,” she says. “He’s a very reluctant king.”

Later on in the movement we have two quarter notes followed by two eight notes, and then another quarter note and eight note (dah-dah-dada-dah-da). We’re being way too wimpy: “Imagine you’re trying to push a warthog through a hole,” Cheryl tells us.

She’s not finished with the animal imagery. In the sixth and last movement (“Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris”; listen here), there’s an achingly beautiful, lilting passage sung in turn by all four parts (“Tu solus, altisimus”).

“It has to be like a line of ants keeping time, marching across the world,” Cheryl instructs us, “but also sound like smoke, that’s never heard a beat in its life.”

Wow. No wonder we get so inspired when we sing.

Poulenc sharing a quiet moment with a friend
[web photo: source]

Our concerts are this coming weekend: Dec. 3-5, at Holy Cross Church in Santa Cruz. Click here for information about tickets and times.