Concerto pour piano et orchestre

In 1948, Poulenc toured the United States for the first time. He was such a success that the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a piano concerto from him, written in 1949 and premiered in the capital of Massachusetts on 6 January 1950, under the baton of Charles Munch. Poulenc wrote that the work was greeted with “more sympathy than real enthusiasm”. At first sight, there is nothing remotely off-putting about the form with its traditional three-movement format. Certainly, there is a slow passage at the centre of the initial Allegretto, and the Andante con moto contains a faster central episode, but the Concerto pour deux pianos (1932) had already made use of those ideas. The first two movements are dominated by the lyricism characteristic of Poulenc during the 1940s. This makes the contrast created by the finale all the more striking, its rollicking mood more reminiscent of the composer’s works of the 1920s and 30s. Poulenc quotes the song Old Folks at Homeby Stephen Foster in this movement as well as the Maxixe, a Brazilian dance popularised in France by Milhaud (which can also be heard in Gershwin’s An American in Paris). Critics were divided at the French premiere of the Concerto pour piano, in Aix-en-Provence, on 24 July 1950. Claude Rostand defended the score with a phrase that soon become famous: “There are two people in Poulenc’s work: there is, if I may put it like this, something of the monk and something of the rascal. The latter is the one who has written this new concerto. A bad boy, sensual and affectionate, cheeky and tender, gracious and blunt, aristocratic and common, and who has infinite distinction in the working-class accent.”