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Guest post by Frances Jones

As a big fan of Poulenc’s music, I’m delighted to see his Concerto for Two Pianos on the Proms programme this year. It’s an exciting piece, both for performers and audience alike, and great to see in concert. But it’s the solo repertoire that occupies my thoughts at the moment, as I try to get to grips with another of his Nocturnes. I mentioned in a previous article back in May that I was working on the first Nocturne and although I haven’t made as much progress as I might in learning the rest, snatches of these sublime musical portraits have been flitting around my head like moths around a camp-fire (more on moths later).

There are eight Nocturnes, composed between 1929 and 1938 when Francis Poulenc was in his 30s. Some of them have descriptive titles, suggesting glimpses of civilised nocturnal scenes, and they alternate between the serenely beautiful and the fast and furious.

Number 1 falls into the first category; Poulenc’s ability to write a beautiful melody is proven in the opening bars, and he uses the range of the piano and takes unexpected harmonic turns as the music progresses. It is at once original, with an edge of melancholy, and also deeply comforting to listen to. Despite the discords, the music always resolves but almost never to a straightforward major chord; there’s always a note that ‘jars’ slightly with the rest. I like to think this is Poulenc’s way of telling us that, whilst there might be great beauty in the world, there is no such thing as perfection in life and his music does not intend to escape this.

Number 3, ‘Les Cloches de Malines’, gives us the bell-like sound promised in the title. He sets up an almost-repeated bassline to represent the bells, switching from 3 time to 4 time and back so it feels out of kilter; with Poulenc, there is always a twist. After being lulled into a false sense of security with the bells’ gentle music, there is a bar of complete silence, followed by a passage of brash accented chords, marked agité. It is as if the bells have gone rogue, and reminds me of one of Charles Dickens’ Christmas stories, in which the traveller is tormented by incessant ringing and imagines climbing up the church tower to the bells which have taken on frightening forms. He awakes in the morning and, of course, it’s all been a dream. So it is in this nocturne; after the clanging and clashing there’s another bar of silence and the familiar bassline of the opening returns; all is well, and normality has been restored.

The fifth nocturne is a portrait of moths (‘Phalènes’) and, as the music is both presto and staccato in the opening section, these insects seem to be clamouring around a light; a street-lamp perhaps, or a glint from a window. The music is animated and there’s no real let-up until the end. It switches between pp and f, even ff, from legato to staccato, until finally coming to rest with a big sforzando chord.

Number 7 is another of the faster pieces but this one is joyful from the outset. It was written in August, 1935; perhaps the composer was enjoying a summer holiday in the country or at the coast – but this is speculation. The music runs up and down the keyboard in a friendly chase. Even the middle section, steady and perhaps somewhat cautious if a depiction of a character was intended, lasts only a short time before the carefree melody of the opening returns. This nocturne has no title; it’s up to the listener to make their own conjectures.

The final nocturne, Number 8, was written as a coda to the collection. It’s another lyrical melody, but concise; a final moment of gentle beauty after the antics of the previous piece. Number 8 brings the cycle full circle, using the ending of the first nocturne to draw the piece, and the collection, to a close. Having listened to these pieces countless times, I feel I’ve gained a glimpse into the composer’s life. But only a glimpse and, after all, that’s what these nocturnes are; sounds of the evening, auditory shapes in the twilight. I like that about them; the titles of some give us ideas but, for the rest, we can make our own suppositions. I haven’t yet come close to learning all eight, but I feel much better acquainted with them, and that’s a good start.

Frances Jones read music at York University followed by a PGCE at Cambridge. She teaches piano in SW London.

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I can’t remember when I first heard this piece, but it was almost certainly on BBC Radio Three’s Breakfast programme and, as is often the way, the piece caught my attention and I decided to find out more about it.

My score has the date “September 2013” inscribed on the inside cover, which means I purchased the sheet music just a month after I took delivery of my 1913 Bechstein model A grand piano. A few months prior to this, I visited the Cobbe Collection, a fascinating collection of historic keyboard instruments, and had the opportunity to play a square piano which had belonged to Edward Elgar. 

(Image: The Cobbe Collection)

Elgar composed Dream Children in 1902, so my piano is almost contemporary with the piece. Originally written for small orchestra, the work offers a glimpse into the composer’s more introspective and poetic side. The transcription for solo piano highlights the music’s delicate lyricism and nostalgic in a more intimate setting. The work’s reflective mood and gentle expressiveness make it one of Elgar’s most personal and touching miniatures.

The title Dream Children comes from an essay by Charles Lamb, “Dream Children: A Reverie,” published in 1822. In that essay, Lamb imagines telling stories to his children – who, by the end, are revealed to be only figments of his imagination, the children he might have had with his lost love, Alice. Elgar was deeply moved by Lamb’s bittersweet meditation on memory, loss, and the power of dreams, and he translated those emotions into music with remarkable sensitivity.

The piece consists of two short movements. The first, marked Andante, unfolds like a tender lullaby. Scored in 12/8, it has the feeling of a gentle barcarolle with a simple and songlike melody evoking the innocence of childhood and the wistful beauty of remembered joy. The music rarely leaves the pp and ppp dynamic range, except for bar 8 where there is a moment of drama marked molto lento, leading to a sustained g minor chord. Elgar emphasises the tender wistfulness of the piece through the use of rubato, ritardandos and pauses. At the very end, a single modulation through the introduction of a B natural in the bass brings the piece to an close on a hopeful, literally uplifting note.

The second movement, Allegretto piacevole, provides an animated contrast while maintaining the same emotional core. Its mood and rhythm is more animated, with a gently lilting character. A pianist friend of mine remarked that the semiquaver figures in this movement suggest the composer cycling around the countryside of Malvern where he lived. Yet even in its lighter moments, there is an underlying poignancy. The coda returns to the theme of the first movement, back in g minor now, but once again the music ends in G major, fading into a ppp whisper.

While not especially technically challenging for the pianist (I would say this piece is around Grade 6 to 7 standard), the piece requires sensitivity of touch and competent legato pedalling in the first movement to sustain the cantabile melody. And while the first movement remains in a mostly hushed dynamic range, there is plenty of scope for expressivity.

I recently played this piece for a friend who owns a beautiful Steinway B. Having not touched the music for nearly 10 years, I was reminded of just how charming this pair of miniatures is. The score is published by Faber Music.

Here’s another atmospheric solo piano piece by Elgar:

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Guest post by Samantha Ege

As a student, I loved thumbing through the pages of a piano collection, whether in a music store, charity shop, or library. Each score was its own rabbit hole. The more obscure, the better. “What else is out there?” I would wonder.

Losing track of time in a music shop feels rather nostalgic now, especially as most scores can be found online. But as a musicologist who spends time with handwritten manuscripts, I still cherish that gorgeously tactile experience. In those moments, I am transported to the feeling of endless curiosity that shaped my early path.

CDs, also an increasingly nostalgic medium, were part of my journey too.

I remember, just before I went to study music at the University of Bristol in 2008, my piano teacher gave me a CD called Kaleidoscope (2001), by the Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin. I saw a few familiar names on the track list: Rachmaninoff, Poulenc, and Kapustin. But many others were a revelation. My favourite was Arthur Lourié’s “Gigue.” I was swept up in its thunderous rhythms and harmonic whirlwinds. In fact, I ordered the score from a local music shop in Bristol not long after I arrived.

During my second year, I went to McGill University in Montreal (coincidentally the city where Hamelin was born). In my professor’s Early Twentieth-Century Music class, I encountered a second Kaleidoscope CD. The performer on this 1995 recording was yet another Canadian pianist with a penchant for the obscure: Helen Walker-Hill.

Walker-Hill was also a musicologist. She bridged her pianistic prowess with an interest in classical music’s hidden histories. Her former husband was the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Walker. Their son, violinist Gregory T. S. Walker, joined her on parts of Kaleidoscope. The album’s subtitle was “Music by African-American Women” and Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre in E minor for solo piano (composed in 1929) was the final track.

Both Hamelin’s and Walker-Hill’s Kaleidoscope shaped the patterns of my own work as a musicologist and pianist. As a student, it was not enough for me to hear the music of Lourié without tracking down the score. Similarly, as soon as I heard the Chopin-esque cascades and Negro spiritual influence of Price’s Fantasie, I had to know more.

Today, Price’s story as the most celebrated African American female symphonist of the 1930s and 40s is part of the classical mainstream. This knowledge stems from many efforts over many years to bring her legacy to the fore, including those of Walker-Hill (who died in 2013), and those of the late musicologist and organist Rae Linda Brown (who passed away in 2017). The culmination of Brown’s work – a biography titled The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price – was published three years after her death.

A few months before Brown’s passing, I emailed her to share that I was writing an MA thesis on Price at the University of York (which became my PhD dissertation). Brown encouraged me to visit Price’s archives at the University of Arkansas. In fact, Brown’s warm response arrived when I was already there.

Throughout my archival work, two things captivated me: first, Price had composed a total of four Fantasies Nègres for solo piano, meaning there was more music out there. Second, she was far from an anomaly as a classical composer of African descent.

Regarding the first, the thought of presenting Price’s Fantasies in their entirety took me back to my love of diving into a body of works, like Brahms’ late piano opuses, Albeniz’s Iberia, and Debussy’s Estampes (all favourites of mine as a student). There was something about the heft of a complete collection, which defines so many of our great composers, that I wanted to create with Price. After all, Price viewed her Four Fantasies as a collection. The spiritual beauty of Fantasie Nègre No. 1 in E minor, the Brahmsian introspection of Fantasie Nègre No. 2 in G minor, the velvet colourings of Fantasie Nègre No. 3 in F minor, and the impassioned virtuosity of Fantasie Nègre No. 4 in B minor were all connected.

When I returned to Price’s archives in 2019 to focus on the Fantasies, it became clear that No. 3 wouldinvolve some detective work. The first two pages were all I could find. I therefore had to look for loose sheets of manuscript with similar musical characteristics to complete the score.

Additionally, I noticed that the original version of Fantasie Nègre No. 4 was twice as long and a million times more complex than the five-minute version G. Schirmer had recently published. Price likely shortened and simplified it because short and simple works by women were more marketable in the 1930s. But in the 21st century, it was time to hear what she was truly capable of.

As for the second realisation, I’d always found the notion of a compositional school intriguing, from the First and Second Viennese Schools to The Five and Les Six. Well, Price belonged to an era of cultural rebirth known as the Black (or Negro) Renaissance. What’s more, women were far from minor footnotes. Alongside composers Margaret Bonds, Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King, the Canadian Robert Nathaniel Dett, and England’s Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (who mentored many Black Renaissance composers), Price believed in classical music’s power to generate social harmony.

My new sheet music publications – Fantasie Nègre: Four Fantasies by Florence B. Price and Piano Music of the Black Renaissance – celebrate this history. They also carry the imprint of my own prismatic influences, from Hamelin’s adventurous programming to Walker-Hill’s and Brown’s scholarly spotlight on classical music’s “hidden figures.”

I would have loved to stumble across these volumes as a student. But as I look ahead, regardless of whether pianists engage with the physical scores or digital downloads, I am excited for the kaleidoscopic journeys these editions will inspire as curious fingers descend upon the keys.

Samantha Ege is a musicologist, pianist, and author.

www.samanthaege.com

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Guest post by Frances Jones

In the days before self-service machines, when library books were issued by hand and date-stamped, I would feel sorry when I opened a book to see it last stamped more than a decade before. I thought of the volume standing slightly lop-sided on the shelf, waiting for a person to stop and take it home. I’ve been feeling a similar way recently, as I take down off my shelf music that I haven’t looked at for years. One such collection is Francis Poulenc’s Three Novelettes, speckled with a scattering of pencil markings and an old PIN for a bank card. So last year I sat down and learned the first of the Novelettes, playing it in an informal concert for my students (they are very forgiving of my significant lapse in regular practice).

Even as I discover more of Poulenc’s piano music, Novelette No. 1 remains one of my favourite works by this French composer. Written in 1927, when Poulenc was about 28, it’s a joyful piece and full of character. The opening melody is serenely beautiful, and it always gives me a sense of calm. Enjoy this for its own sake, it’s saying; just listen, and stop rushing around. It floats over an arpeggiated bassline in C major and although there are discords, they are so subtle as to pass almost unnoticed. There’s then a minor section, where the discordancy becomes more obvious, but it’s over with quickly and after a lyrical passage we’re into a bawdy dance; I can just imagine drinkers stomping round the bar in days gone by. A reflective passage follows and we head away from the party back into the peaceful serenity of the opening theme, with the thick chords near the end sounding bell-like in their brightness.

Novelette No. 2 is, on first hearing, very different. It brings to mind, for me, a company of elves, cavorting around a woodland fire. The upbeat tempo, staccato articulation and use of the piano’s range helps conjure up this image. The melody is so dance-like, but light and quick, suggesting something other than even the most agile of human dancers. Introduced to this revelry is a stately tune that threatens to calm the festivities, but it lasts merely a few bars before tumbling down and jostling with the opening pixie theme, eventually succumbing in a ff glissando. The opening music returns, and the elves dance away into the night, sans relentir.

There is a third Novelette, which was written many years later, in 1959. For me, it feels like a separate piece; it’s based on a theme by Manuel de Falla, and is beautiful, yes, but also nostalgic and reflective with a tinge of melancholy. To me, it’s another example of Poulenc seeming to make the task of composition so easy. The melody soars above the bass and then appears in the middle of the piano before flying up again and ending at peace, or so I like to think.

I was introduced to Poulenc’s music through the ABRSM; Improvisation No 13 by Francis Poulenc was on the Grade 8 piano list around the turn of the millennium and I still have the collection. Written in 1958, this Improvisation is wistful and yearning; a composer looking back, perhaps. Poulenc had a playful nature, but there was a deeply serious side to his character, which is evident in so much of his work (his piano pieces are just a small part of his output). Poulenc’s writing is so expressive, and although there’s a melancholy air scattered across his piano music, somehow I always find it uplifting (with the possible exception of Mélancolie itself, written in 1945). It’s the ability to seemingly pluck a melody out of the air that I love; his writing is both graceful and perfectly formed, and with bursts of humour that show a different side of his personality.

Replaying the Novelettes has spurred me on to find more of Poulenc’s piano music. I love the first Nocturne but haven’t looked properly at the other seven, nor learnt the Impromptus. Despite the fact that attempting any of the above will be a challenge, I can’t wait.

Frances Jones read music at York University followed by a PGCE at Cambridge. She teaches piano in SW London.