Concerto for two pianos and orchestra

In the inter-war period, the American-born arts patron Princess Edmond de Polignac, wishing to give a new lease of life to the concerto genre, commissioned Poulenc to write a work for three pianos (one of which was to be given soloist status), without orchestra. The composer convinced her to accept instead a Concerto for two pianos and orchestra. He worked on it during the summer of 1932 and gave the premiere at the Venice International Music Festival on 5 September, with Jacques Février and the Orchestra of La Scala Milan conducted by Désiré Defauw. His score adopts the usual three movements, but the first one is divided into three parts with contrasting tempos, thus reproducing on a smaller scale the fast-slow-fast pattern of the whole work. The middle movement, on the other hand, is in three parts, slow-fast-slow. And the finale recalls the rondo structure. References to Bach are combined with stylised Balinese music in the coda of the opening movement (Poulenc had encountered a Balinese gamelan at the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris), and with nods to jazz and the world of music-hall in the finale. The work also contains real quotations: the last movement borrows from Poulenc’s Novelette no. 2, while the beginning of the Larghetto takes up the theme of the slow movement from Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 26 in D major K. 537. “I permitted myself, for the opening theme, to return to Mozart, because I have a fondness for the melodic line, and I prefer Mozart to all other musicians,” Poulenc admitted to Claude Rostand. In the concerto as a whole, the music skips from one thing to another with delightful ease.