FAURÉ • POULENC

Fauré Pavane; Masques et Bergamasques Suite

Poulenc: Aubade; Sinfonietta Västeras Sinfonietta/howard Shelley

DB Productions DBCD 177 67 mins

If Fauré, so far as we know, never pronounced about Poulenc’s music, Poulenc claimed that some of the modulations in La bonne chanson

actually made him feel ill. So pairing off the two composers may at first sight seem a touch wilful. But here it works splendidly, not least because Howard Shelley treats them both without any sentimental swooning, thereby bringing out the Baroque architecture that underpins their Romantic surfaces. Shelley observes in his liner note that Poulenc was fond of the marking ‘sans rubato’,

and duly follows this instruction, to excellent effect. Aubade comes over, as it should despite its slender forces, as a truly powerful, desperate work, the fruit of the first of Poulenc’s many depressive episodes, with the tapping minor thirds of the final bars of Oedipus Rex well to the fore. The virtuosic piano part is in good hands too, ranging from the elaborately skittish to the massively chordal.

In the Sinfonietta, Shelley manages the sometimes tricky orchestral balances with an equally sure hand – what a delightful piece this is, this time the Oedipus Rex

contribution coming from what Stravinsky called its ‘mortuary tarantella’. Fauré in neo-classical mood likewise benefits from this unfussy treatment, with his long melodic lines beautifully shaped and some exquisite woodwind playing. Altogether the disc succeeds absolutely in its declared intention of showing how, in their different idioms, two of France’s greatest composers dealt with what Debussy called ‘the ghost of old Klingsor’.