The works by Francis Poulenc that make up the program of this Naxos release have all been recorded frequently, the surrealist Sept chansons of 1936 perhaps a bit less often than the others. But they've rarely or never been put together in this sequence, which has a lot to tell the listener interested in the second half of Poulenc's career, when he became primarily a religious composer. The four compositions (or sets of them) are entirely different in effect, yet clearly recognizable as products of the same composer, and ...
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The works by Francis Poulenc that make up the program of this Naxos release have all been recorded frequently, the surrealist Sept chansons of 1936 perhaps a bit less often than the others. But they've rarely or never been put together in this sequence, which has a lot to tell the listener interested in the second half of Poulenc's career, when he became primarily a religious composer. The four compositions (or sets of them) are entirely different in effect, yet clearly recognizable as products of the same composer, and Canadian conductor Noel Edison, leading the sharp Elora Festival Singers (the name refers to a small music festival in western Ontario), makes them flow from one to the other. The Sept chansons are secular works with surrealist texts, but for their listeners at the time they would have referred to the death of composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud in a car crash, and their mixture of meditative and edgy leads nicely into the Mass in G major of the following year, with its bright mood and sharp...
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