Oboe Sonata

Elégie: paisiblement

Scherzo: très animé

Déploration: très calme

The Oboe Sonata which, according to the composer, was “cooked in the same pot” as the Clarinet Sonata in 1962, is dedicated to the memory of Sergei Prokofiev. It was Poulenc’s very last work. He cannot have known that he had only a few months to live and yet its sorrowful aspect, which informs both the opening Elégie and the final Déploration, is surely more widespread and more prominent than it would be in a work inspired only by the loss of a distant colleague who had died nearly ten years earlier and who didn’t much like Poulenc’s music anyway.

    Whatever was in the composer’s mind when he wrote it, the Elégie seems to have more to do with Poulenc - the two main themes are no less characteristic of him for sounding like Stravinsky in one case and Debussy in the other - than with Prokofiev. If Prokofiev is here at all it is in the Scherzo, which echoes several of the Russian composer’s stylistic features, not least in its expressive middle section, and which by the end is almost as sad as the other two movements. And if ever a composer was saying farewell to life, modestly but poignantly, it is Poulenc in the final Déploration, a lament that lingers over material from the Elégie before just slipping discreetly away at the end.

Gerald Larner©