Most of the music Francis Poulenc wrote for orchestra was for ballets and plays, in addition to choral scores with orchestra, concertos and various arrangements. The Sinfonietta (1947) is his only symphonic work. Still, it is four movements that sound more like scenic music than a Symphony. He called it Sinfonietta, short for Symphony.
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Since early 1924, when the Ballets Russes premiered the ballet Les Biches in Monte Carlo, Francis Poulenc has become a name with international prestige. The Parisian musician then began to receive well-paid commissions, such as the one that came to him from the BBC in 1947, which led to his only composition expressly intended for orchestra. The challenge suggested as a rough model Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony – a small symphony for small orchestra. The intention was to celebrate the first anniversary of a BBC radio program in September 1947. However, the creative process proved to be lengthy and it would not be premiered until the following year. In August of that year, I had already composed the first three movements. Two of them had even been orchestrated, but the last one would take another year to be completed.
According to him, the Sinfonietta recovered a good part of the melodic themes from a string quartet that he had destroyed around the same time because he was not satisfied with the result. Poulenc was not a composer prone to classical formats. This work demonstrates this well. Instead of structural cohesion, it wanders through contrasting sound mosaics, diverse styles succeeding each other in seemingly random ways. It is as if there is the deliberate intention of a scattered exercise. Perhaps this is the reason why it never made it to the list of repertoire most frequently played by orchestras. It is full of beautiful melodies, sometimes with great rhythmic vivacity, and convincing orchestration. But the jagged structure, the apparent disorganization, demands a particular disposition from the listener. The explanation will therefore pass through the unpredictability in the relationship between what happened before and what comes after. Everything indicates that Poulenc’s musical thinking would not be compatible with classical ideas such as Thematic Development or Formal Planning. Instead, it focused on the instant, the here and now. The sound effects are bright and incisive, but do not favor discursive linearity. Apparently, Poulenc did not work memory or conceive the idea of posterity as an artistic design. He was approaching fifty years of age, but he continued to live the present with the same dedication with which in his youth he lived the Roaring Twenties.
Rui Campos Leitão