French concert programme — Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Françaix & others

Fiona Cross/Hugh Webb 12 May

NB this is the correct order of items - Hugh Webb has confirmed this with me

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

La plus que lente

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Romance, Op.37

Jean Françaix (1912-1997)

Cinque piccoli duetti

Preludio: Presto

Pastorale: Moderato

Canzonetta: Vivace

Sogno: Andantino

Rondo: Allegrissimo

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1982)

Abîme des oiseaux

??? Archbold (b.19??) to be completed by Helen *****

title of new work??? To be inserted by Helen****

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Une Châtelaine en sa tour, Op.110

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Les Chemins de l’amour

Erik Satie (1866-1925)

Je te veux

Georges Auric (1899-1983)

Le Moulin Rouge

all arrangements for clarinet and harp by Fiona Cross and Hugh Webb

In spite of its lyrical potential - with the strong singing voice of the one and the poetic resources of the other - the combination of clarinet and harp is one that few composers have explored. The harp’s regular woodwind partner is the flute, which blends well with it and which, as Berlioz and Bizet among others have confirmed, joins it most effectively in music in a pastoral style. So, until composers like ???(Helen to supply first name***) Archbold (see separate note by the composer below) have created a repertoire of original works for clarinet and harp, it is a matter of finding suitable material in pieces written for other instruments, or in songs even, and making arrangements that will demonstrate just how well the two of them go together. French music seems to be particularly abundant in such items.

The Saint-Saëns Romance, written originally for flute or violin in 1871, was for decades a tea-time favourite at any café with a violin-and-piano duo in residence. For a clarinet-and-harp duo - with its well defined melodic line and arpeggiated accompaniment, its bravura middle section, its exchange of thoughts in a brief development and its reprise of the opening section - it is a sheer gift. As we shall see, Debussy was to make a chic comment on this kind of thing forty years later.

Jean Françaix wrote so much for all kinds of instrumental combinations that it is just a misfortune that there is nothing by him for clarinet and harp. The next best thing is his Cinque piccoli duetti , written in the early 1970s for flute and harp. Its five well varied movements, which are played without a break, should sound no less well with clarinet and in some cases, like the gently breathing Sogno (“Dream”), perhaps even better.

Debussy’s La plus que lente, a “more than slow” waltz, confected in 1910 “for the brasserie at tea time,” according to the composer, “and the pretty listeners who meet there,” contrives to be both wickedly satirical of the café-concert and endearing at the same time. Originally a piano piece, with its supple melodic line drawn over a chordal accompaniment at the start and with more characteristically harp-like figuration rising to the surface later, it is no less a gift to the clarinet-and-harp duo than the Saint-Saëns Romance.

Abîme des oiseaux (“Abyss of the birds”) is the third movement, scored for clarinet alone, of the Quatuour pour la fin du Temps that Olivier Messiaen wrote for himself and three fellow prisoners of war while interned in Stalag VIII at Görlitz in Silesia in 1940. If that makes it seem a little incongruous in this company, it is in fact, both here and in its original context, a valuable moment of mystic contemplation. It is in two alternating tempi, a slow one representing, according to the composer, the “abyss of time with its sadnesses, its lassitudes,” and a quicker one devoted to the birds, “the opposite of time, our desire for light, stars, rainbows and jubilant song.”

Gabriel Fauré’s favourite harpist was Micheline Kahn who, at the age of fourteen, had won the first prize for harpists at the Paris Conservatoire in 1904, when his Impromptu, Op.86, was the test piece. He had since allowed her to make harp arrangements of some of his piano pieces and in 1918 he wrote specially for her Une châtelaine en sa tour (“A chatelaine in her tower”). The title is a clue not so much to the character of the music as to its thematic source, the melodic phrase that goes with the words “une châtelaine en son tour” in the first song in Fauré’s Verlaine cycle La Bonne Chanson. A characteristically poetic creation, it includes a short cadenza after the canonic reprise of the main theme and ends in disembodied harmonics.

As for the song arrangements in today’s programme: Poulenc’s Les Chemins de l’amour is a Viennese waltz written as part of the incidental music for Anouilh’s Leocadia in 1940; Satie’s Je te veux is a seductive and essentially Parisian cabaret valse very much of its fin-de-siècle period; and Auric’s Le Moulin Rouge is a clever pastiche of much the same period written for the film of that name half a century later.

Programme notes by Gerald Larner©

*** Archbold note to be inserted here