Concerto in D minor for two pianos

The piano concertos of Mozart, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Ravel, the sound of the Balinese percussion gamelan, the popular music of the Parisian dance hall and café-concert: all these are clearly recognisable influences on Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos. And yet, paradoxically, they add up to a distinctive Poulenc sound. The reason for that, a cynic might suggest, is that only Poulenc would try it on so shamelessly. The more charitable and more pertinent explanation is that, like Stravinsky, he had the rare gift of making a wholesome musical compound out of the most disparate stylistic elements. After its triumphant first performance by Francis Poulenc and Jacques Février with the Orchestra of La Scala at the Venice Festival in 1932, the Concerto for Two Pianos achieved universal and lasting popularity – not least in this country, where Benjamin Britten twice partnered the composer at the other piano.

Another paradox associated with the work is that it deliberately flouts formal conventions and, by similarly mysterious means, makes a virtue of its apparent disorganisation. The first movement sounds for most of its duration as though it has been set up as a straightforward ternary construction. There is the opening Allegro ma non troppo section, which begins like the last movement of Ravel’s recently completed Piano Concerto in G (a work Poulenc thought “marvellous”) and which includes several cheekily irreverent music-hall allusions. Then there is the slower, more lyrical middle section, calling Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto to mind. But the reprise of the Allegro ma non troppo material is cut abruptly short – to make way for a meditation on three solo cellos and double bass, a little rattle on castanets and a poetically attenuated coda described by Poulenc as “one of my best achievements.” The two soloists sustain gentle, gamelan-like ostinatos against which the first piano and then a solitary cello in harmonics project a distant echo of the slow movement of the Ravel Concerto.

“In the Larghetto of this Concerto,” Poulenc wrote, “I have taken the liberty, for the opening theme, of returning to Mozart because I believe in melody and because I prefer Mozart to all other musicians.” The outer sections are based on a variant of the main theme of the Larghetto of the Concerto in D major K.537 and make another prominent feature of a familiar cadence figure from the Andante of the Concerto in C major K467. If, at the point where the second piano joins the first, he comes perilously close to sounding like four-handed Fauré, Poulenc find himself in more congenial popular-song territory in the quicker middle section.

Having delivered a conventionally shaped (ternary) slow movement, Poulenc clearly felt free to offer a Finale with no formal precedent and only its own exuberant spontaneity to motivate the succession of events. It could be compared to a rondo, with the boisterous opening toccata as the main theme, except that the reappearances of that theme are rare, brief and continually upstaged by an irrepressibly abundant variety of other material – a march, a cheerful song, an ever more raucous fanfare, a passionately lyrical climax almost worthy of Rachmaninov… There is, on the other hand, a significant gesture towards long-term unity when, after a sudden pause, the two pianos recall the gamelan from the first movement, now fortissimo rather than pianissimo in dynamics and emphatically conclusive in effect.