Richard Buell will be contributing a column from time to time on music in Boston. His first for BMInt features excerpts from Francis Poulenc, “‘Echo and Source’: Selected Correspondence 1915-1963,” translated and edited by Sidney Buckland; research consultant: Patrick Saul (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1991)

“What a dismal town” — Francis Poulenc, the  Gloria, and Boston

201. Francis Poulenc to Brigitte Manceaux
Boston, Tuesday evening, 3 January 1950

Ma bichette,

Well, that’s it … this morning we played through the Concerto [for piano] for the first time. The orchestration is excellent and Charloton [Charles Munch] is  delighted, delighted. So am I. Of course I played like a pig — my attention being mainly on my orchestration — but I will rectify that in the morning. Naturally, the first movement changes the most (and for the better): the second subject is ravishing and the two orchestral tutti, soli – hopeless when played on two pianos — are on the contrary quite perfect. The Andante is as I expected, the Finale very amusing. The whole bang lot is stunning. The orchestra was delighted. Thirty Frenchmen among them. Munch has conducted the Concerto for organ twice this autumn — it has had an incredible success here. It has been recorded and I am going to hear the test copies any day now.

I am leading an austere life in this very puritanical town. Fortunately the museum is fantastic, as much for painting as for Egypt, Asia, Greece, etc.

Charloton is a treasure, and as French as Maurice Chevalier when one sees him in this environment. He lives in a charming country house, half an hour from the town. Naturally Ginette [Neveu's] death was a most dreadful blow to him.

I rehearse every morning. Light, easy piano, very pleasant hall. By the grace of God. I eagerly await your news. Give mine to everybody around you. Pierre [Bernac] has just phoned from New York, delighted with his trip and entirely rejuvenated by his success.

On that note I leave you to go and rehearse.

A thousand tender kisses.

Fr.

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298. Francis Poulenc to Charles Munch
Hotel Bristol Palace, Genoa, Italy, 23 May 1959

Dear and alas invisible friend, I am writing to you from Genoa where, after Naples and Catania, my Carmelites is being performed. I am supposed to be writing a new opera for La Scala but as the choice of a libretto has not yet been settled (perhaps La Machine infernale of Cocteau) I have a certain amount of time at my disposal to begin a symphonic work. The Koussevitzky Foundation having twice asked me for a work, I have suggested writing a Gloria for mixed choir, soprano solo and orchestra, 20 to 25 minutes in duration. You may perhaps be able to sway the balance in my favour if there is any hesitation. You know that the pure symphonic form is not my forte whereas with the human voice — no allusion to my latest work — I am usually successful .

I still had hopes that you might conduct my Stabat in Boston, but alas … you have no doubt entirely forgotten me. Believe me, the extraordinary success of Les Carmelites has not made me less sensitive to certain omissions. However, I still admire you and am as fond of you as ever.

Thank you in advance for what you may be able to do for me and believe, cher ami, in my loyal affection.

Francis Poulenc

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323. Francis Poulenc to Pierre Bernac
Sheraton Plaza Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts, Tuesday [January 1961]

Mon petit Pierre,

My first long letter is for you. Phone it through to Brigitte afterwards and she will do the same for you with the next letter. The concert here promises to be very good. An excellent ‘Monique’ [Evelyne Crochet], young, pleasant, catches on quickly and loves my Concerto [for two pianos]. As for the  Gloria, if I had not come here, what peculiar music would have been heard! Dear, adorable, exquisite Charlie had understood precisely  nothing.

Arriving for the first rehearsal of the choir, I heard something so unlike me that my legs almost failed me on the staircase. Excellent choir but [Alfred Nash] Patterson is not the intuitive [Robert] Shaw and all those worthy Protestants were singing sharp and shrill (especially the women) as they do in London, with that ‘Oh my good Lord! quality. All Munch’s tempi were wrong — all too fast, naturally. A well-intentioned lady was singing the part of [Adele] Addison (who had not yet arrived), with a voice like a goat and all out of tune. A pale, wan pianist tinkled the keys, and not always the right ones!! I tell you, I wanted to run a mile. My poor child was really presenting itself badly. What a burden music is!!!

I didn’t say a word before the interval but then I explained everything. Mr Patterson, hearing me demonstrate, said: ‘Oh! so they have to sing like Maurice Chevalier.’ ‘Exactly!’ When we started again, I played the piano, the soloist sang no more, Munch calmed down, and the thing was perfect. Ouf!!!

Basically, Charlie only understands Arthur [Honegger] and Roussel. How very Strasbourgeois he is, the dear treasure! I had lunch at his place. It was divine. Everybody is adorable here, but what a dismal town — I am dying of boredom despite the radio and the TV in my room. Quick, New York!

Here is this winter’s barometer of virtuosos: Richter — delirium; Samson — triumph with orchestra, recital less good; Monique — went unnoticed; continued success of Entremont, who will become Casadesus (don’t tell ‘his’ Countess!!!). The Met, wild with excitement in anticipation of the joint debuts of Price and Corelli in  Trovatore. I shall be there. Tebaldi — Della Casa: usual success. Enormous success of la Simionato in L’Incoronazione di Poppea.

I must go to my rehearsal with orchestra. Wonder what that will bring!

Very much affection to you and the Queen of Hearts.

Fr.

P.S. I was not made for going on tour on my own.

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325. Francis Poulenc to Pierre Bernac
Boston, Thursday morning [January 1961]

Mon petit Pierre,

The rehearsal yesterday was extraordinary. Munch suddenly inspired; as for Addison, she drives you wild, she is sheer heaven, with that warm Negro purity.

Everyone was full of enthusiasm. Clearly, you know me better than I know myself. The Gloria is without doubt the best thing I have done. The orchestration is marvellous (the ending, among other things, is astonishing). There is not a single note to be changed in the choral writing and at least the women do not shriek their heads off on the upper As and Bs. I must confess that I have surprised myself.

It has given me a confidence that I badly needed. How right I was not to rush Les Repons. I am sure it will benefit from this. Everybody is delighted here. And I have at last shaken off the torpor of the time-change.

Rose [Dercourt-Plaut] is arriving this evening, wild with delight about this honeymoon!!!!! We are going to hear Marlene Dietrich! I am enjoying it all very much. The Consul, a great-nephew of Vincent d’Indy, is handsome and charming. His wife as well. But what a hard country! Arthur [Honegger] is hardly ever played here any more, except by Munch. It is frightening. For the moment I am still going strong, thanks to the choral works, concertos and wind compositions. Long may it last.

Phone Brigitte [Manceaux] right now, and Genevieve [Sienkiewicz].

I embrace you,

Fr.

I miss you. To quote  La Voix [humaine]: ‘I am not used to traveling alone any more.’

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326. Francis Poulenc to Pierre Bernac
Boston, Monday [1961]

Eh bien mon enfant, it was a triumph to beat all triumphs!

You heard that because of the snow, Friday’s concert was put off until yesterday — Sunday. Saturday’s concert went ahead. Very good, very beautiful, successful, but Munch was less inspired than at the final rehearsal. Yesterday, on the other hand (all the critics were there), sublime performance. Charlie in a trance but controlled, the choir unbelievable, Addison beyond belief, so ovation after ovation. They tell me the press is excellent this morning. Marlene Dietrich was there, embraces, photos, etc.

I am delighted, as audiences here — quite dreadful — give you marks! I can already feel a favourable feeling from Bernstein. I am busy arranging something for you in Boston for this summer. The Consul, Charles de Pampelonne, is exquisite (grand-nephew of d’Indy). I will tell you about him when I get back. Yes, we would have been at your funeral had you accepted Boston. Munch has had just enough.

My week here promises to be entertaining with Leontyne Price, Laurence Olivier in Becket, visits to Horowitz, Titou, Rubinstein, etc.

I find this country interesting but frightening. You have to be really on top of things not to suffer the whims of the public and the press: even stranger than at home.

Thank you for writing at such length. I can assure you that you are not forgotten here. If you see Lesur tell him about the success of the Gloria. I had a letter from an ecstatic Carteri. So let’s take advantage of the fair weather!

I embrace you,

Fr. Poulenc

Ring Brigitte.

WGBH’s spokesman, John Voci may be unintentionally right according to a BMInt commenter. The future for classical music broadcasting may be on the internet rather than from 100,000 watt radio towers, which, because of their cost of operation, require lowest common denominator programming. Richard Buell, a former Boston Globe critic, has a comprehensive website on streaming classical music here. His comment, which follows, is part of a lively discussion at the end of an earlier article .

Have you ever wondered what can classical music radio be like far, far away from dear provincial little Boston? If you’ll give me your attention …

Across the Channel from France Musique — which Joel Cohen rightly praises — you hear such offerings as BBC Radio 3’s CD Review, whose regular Building a Library feature amounts to a vivid critical discography in sound. Whose recording, say, of Schumann’s Kerner Lieder is THE one to have? One Saturday morning a few months back that wonderful writer Hilary Finch (of Gramophone and the Times) was on hand (and for an hour!) to go through the whole lot of available recordings.

There is nothing remotely like this on U.S. radio stations, and to the best of my knowledge there never has been. I’m streaming the latest program as I write, and at the top of the screen I see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00qn1lr. This week it’s David Nice and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Stop press — Kitaenko has been caught out using a corrupt Soviet text!

My point is that WGBH, WCRB, and the rest are all wedded to a dying technology — blub blub down they go — and that we shouldn’t be sad about this. Thanks to audio streaming, we’re no longer reduced to having to be grateful for small favors.

VERY small favors if you ask me. Don’t get me going on the “presentation” by local “personalities” — the quotation marks are essential — who can’t hear themselves, are often unprepared, and have an infuriating way of getting in the way of the music. I make exceptions for Cathy Fuller and Doug Briscoe. (Whatever happened to him?) As to the rest, the dunking stool would be too good for them.

When the old WGBH was busy documenting Boston’s busy concert life — the very events you read about in the Boston Musical Intelligencer — they had me on their side, faults and all. Ditto for the live BSO broadcasts on WCRB, which I gather have been taking place over their corporate dead body but so what. WHRB is a story in itself and quite apart from the WGBH/WCRB market forces kerfuffle. For this, endless praise is due David Elliott, their resident eminence grise, but for whom I wouldn’t always be coming across something I haven’t heard before, or don’t know as well as I should, and otherwise filling up gaps in my education. The station is — can I say this? — fun. And that’s about it.

At the Old South meeting it was pointed out — from the floor I think — that it’s only a matter of time before — patience everyone — the future arrives and streaming at last becomes a portable thing. [editor’s note: the future is already here for those with cellular broadband]

As to what’s out there right now — see http://www.publicradiofan.com/cgibin/statsearch.pl?format=classical&lang=, and http://www.operacast.com/opstations.htm, http://theairthisweek.blogspot.com/

As the Globe and BMint have observed, Collage New Music’s concert last Monday was no end enlivening, especially the Steven Mackey. Now why couldn’t we be hearing THAT on the radio? After all, this is not Podunk. Or is it?

[ Editor’s note: for the tech-averse or those who wish to listen without their computers on, these sites for reviews of table-top internet radio receivers(which require home network access either by WiFi or Ethernet) should be of interest: http://www.wifiradioreview.com/, http://reviews.cnet.com/best-wifi-radios/,  http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9938479-1.html]

Hard as it may be to imagine, the picture was once very different.

Here is Paul Affelder writing in High Fidelity magazine in 1954 of the first-ever recording of the Sixth Symphony (Vienna Philharmonia [sic] Orchestra, F. Charles Adler, cond. SPA 59/60. 2 12-in. LPs): ” The Mahler Sixth … is a long, lugubrious, bombastic work, scored for a very large orchestra – including hammer and cowbells. The musical ideas also are massive and slow-moving, and two hours of this sort of thing can be very tiring. When I heard one of the very rare concert performances of this symphony in the 1940s, I confess that I became so restless I had to leave the hall – for me, an almost unprecedented action.”

In 1943, Paul Bowles, reviewing the Second Symphony for the old Herald Tribune, was even less charitable: ” – [The] eloquence is employed almost exclusively to give tongue to a megalomaniacal passion for the grandiose. One has a suspicion that, given the proper circumstances, he might have qualified as a favorite with certain groups in the Third Reich, whose doctrine of glorification of the irrational conditions all esthetic manifestations of that country.”

Outrageous bad luck could also play a part, never more so than when Dimitri Mitropoulos conducted the US premiere of the Sixth in 1947 – evidently this was the occasion that sent Affelder rocketing towards the exits – considerations of box office took over in a really big and very American way and the Symphony found itself sharing the bill with Gershwin’s Concerto in F and its starry dedicatee Oscar Levant. That was not all. The live CBS broadcast, heard nationwide, carried the Gershwin in full, the Mahler only in part.

Tempus fugit. Hurtling through the decades, we speed past the advent of the long-playing record (by means of which a growing public gradually came to assimilate what they had been told was sick, radical, “modern” music), then into the convulsive ’60s (Mahler cast as ubiquitous, reckless, Zeitgeist shaker-up, the faithful and ever-studious Lennie in watchful attendance), and from there into a period of industrial expansion and consolidation (could any conductor now dare not include Mahler in his portfolio?) and further on then through periodic advances in sound technology (record the whole lot again, and then again, bulging catalogues be damned) into … jadedness, satiety, indifference?

Not quite, or not quite yet. The music shot down roots in some places, in other places it didn’t. The still rather tinny French-sounding BSO that Erich Leinsdorf inherited from Charles Munch never quite took to Mahler, nor they to him, and not too long after commenced an impressively long (and dozeful) period when decencies of ensemble law and order prevailed and the line in Mahler conducting mostly fell to Seiji Ozawa, who (as Peter G. Davis delicately put it in New York magazine) doesn’t have a neurotic bone in his body. (“Polite” was one of the choicer putdowns in Gramophone’s assessment of Seiji’s complete symphony cycle for Philips.) Need it be said, all this does not a great Mahler orchestra make.

But now, wonder of wonders, and without benefit of tradition, we have one.

And in the Sixth, mind you, which along with the Seventh, still ranks as rather indigestible fare compared to its more welcoming (and reliably ovation-tested) brethren.

Bruno Walter, thou shouldst be living at this hour! Had Mahler’s disciple and champion been present for the Boston Symphony’s performance Tuesday night under James Levine last weekend – radiant, sonorous, full-hearted, vigorously alive in every particle of its being – he would have had to entertain some long, grave second thoughts about a work that he frankly never liked. It was the only one of Mahler’s symphonies that he never conducted.

“The Sixth,” he wrote in his biography of Mahler, “is bleakly pessimistic: it reeks of the bitter taste of the cup of life. In contrast with the Fifth, it says ‘No,’ above all in its last movement, where something resembling the inexorable strife of ‘all against all’ is translated into music. ‘Existence is a burden; death is desirable and life hateful’ might be its motto … [The] work ends in hopelessness and the night of the soul. ‘Non placet’ is his verdict on this world; the ‘other world’ is not glimpsed for a moment.”

It is safe to say that no one in Symphony Hall on October 14 was of that opinion.

From the outset, you knew that this was a performance that would never put a foot wrong – literally. The steady footfalls and dotted rhythms of the opening were anything but a defeatist trudge, going instead with a blessèd lift (lots of upbeat from the conductor here) that summoned up a picture of rude animal health – good sturdy boots, crisp morning air, clear sky, and over it all a keen urgent sense of adventure — where to next? A classical symphony -the perfect arena for timeless struggle-and-victory narratives. Where to next? Somehow – it’s a big movement – we always knew where we were, no matter how abruptly or ominously the landscape kept changing. Levine’s subtle, seamless forwarding of event after event here seemed to come from one single all-encompassing impulse. And it never showed. This, truly, was conducting genius, the wisdom of a lifetime.

Mere verbal paraphrases of sonorous events are surely doomed to failure on occasions like these. But one must try, willy-nilly, hit or miss. The crisp, stinging rhythmic articulation was one of the elements that made this Sixth “go” in a way that it seldom does – a shining hour for this rather special band of percussionists. There was the pure, cool chording of flutes and clarinets together; the strong, sweet, noble playing of the trumpets, a horn section (nine in number) that moved as one and knew no fear. The wonderful John Ferrillo’s oboe solos. And the dark, rich, firmly centered sound of the double bass section. One hasn’t mentioned yet the warmth and naturalness brought out in lyrical passages. The “Alma” theme, which Walter told Mahler was “too sentimental,” wasn’t. He would have a heart of stone who was not moved by the Andante as Levine and the orchestra played it. And so on to the end. (Tuesday’s verdict was that the Andante should come second, the Scherzo third.) This was a symphony that said disturbing things, saw the lurking chaos beneath the surface of things, but in the artistic doing of what it did it affirmed life without reservation. Yes, in the final pages there was annihilation. But was it so very tragic?

Richard Buell, a long-time critic for the Boston Globe, produces “The Air This Week” for that newspaper. He also conducts the music-centered blog “Ear Trumpet” (http://eartrumpeteartrumpet.blogspot.com)