Francis Poulenc (L) – Christiane de Lisle (C) – Louis DeFroment (R) – from the archives of French Radio
Certainly not an obscure work from an overlooked composer. The Concerto for Organ, Percussion and Strings by Francis Poulenc featuring Organist Christiane deLisle and the Chamber Orchestra of French Radio conducted by Louis De Froment in this broadcast from September 7, 1958.
Francis Poulenc made his début as a composer in 1917 with his Rapsodie nègre, a ten-minute, five-movement piece for baritone and chamber group; it was dedicated to Satie and premiered at one of a series of concerts of new music run by the singer Jane Bathori. There was a fashion for African arts in Paris at the time, and Poulenc was delighted to run across some published verses, purportedly Liberian but full of Parisian boulevard slang. He used one of the poems in two sections of the rhapsody. The baritone engaged for the first performance lost his nerve on the platform, and the composer, though no singer, jumped in. This jeu d’esprit was the first of many examples of what Anglophone critics came to call “leg-Poulenc”. Maurice Ravel was amused by the piece and commented on Poulenc’s ability to invent his own folklore. Stravinsky was impressed enough to use his influence to secure Poulenc a contract with a publisher, a kindness that Poulenc never forgot.
The two sides to Poulenc’s musical nature caused misunderstanding during his life and have continued to do so. The composer Ned Rorem observed, “He was deeply devout and uncontrollably sensual”; this still leads some critics to underrate his seriousness. His uncompromising adherence to melody, both in his lighter and serious works, has similarly caused some to regard him as unprogressive. Although he was not much influenced by new developments in music, Poulenc was always keenly interested in the works of younger generations of composers. Lennox Berkeley recalled, “Unlike some artists, he was genuinely interested in other people’s work, and surprisingly appreciative of music very far removed from his. I remember him playing me the records of Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître with which he was already familiar when that work was much less well-known than it is today.” Boulez did not take a reciprocal view, remarking in 2010, “There are always people who will take an easy intellectual path. Poulenc coming after Sacre [du Printemps]. It was not progress.” Other composers have found more merit in Poulenc’s work; Stravinsky wrote to him in 1931: “You are truly good, and that is what I find again and again in your music”.
Christiane DeLisle (Frommer) was immersed in music from a very young age. Her father, Albert Frommer (1875-1952), a former student of the School of Classical and Religious Music (Ecole Niedermeyer), was then the organist of the Notre-Dame de Bon Voyage church in Cannes (Alpes-Maritimes) since 1896 and director of the Choral Union founded by him in 1898. It was he who taught her music and introduced her to the organ: for eight years and from the age of 12, she replaced her father at the organ loft of Notre-Dame de Bon Voyage (1925-1933). At the same time, she pursued advanced studies in Paris, studying harmony and counterpoint with Paul Fauchet (1928-31) as an auditor in his class at the Conservatoire, and organ in private lessons with Louis Vierne and Marcel Dupré (1930-33). In 1933, at the age of 20, she married Melchior de Lisle (1908-1977), from an old Breton family, a civil engineer with a passion for music, the organ, and entomology. After the birth of their first child in Saint-Nazaire and Melchior de Lisle’s appointment as Director of Public Works in Douala (French Cameroon), the family settled in Douala in 1935, where three more children were born and where Christiane de Lisle brought her pedal harmonium. In 1948, she returned to France and the following year was appointed to the Cavaillé-Coll organ at Val-de-Grâce , a position she held until 1965, when she left to succeed Amédée de Vallombrosa at the choir organ of Saint-Eustache (Merklin/Roethinger, 2 manuals, 16 stops). Concurrently, she was Olivier Messiaen’s assistant at the grand organ of La Trinité (1951-1961) and, from 1960, the (volunteer) choir organist of the Suret (1855) at the church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles on rue Saint-Denis . When he left in 1983, this instrument (2 keyboards, 9 stops), placed behind the altar, became unplayable and after a restoration carried out in 1990 by Ets Dargassies-Gonzalez, it will only be played by amateur organists among the faithful.
Louis de Froment was born into a French noble family in Toulouse, and started his musical studies at the city conservatory. He later attended the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique (CNSM) of Paris and was a pupil of Louis Fourestier, Eugène Bigot and André Cluytens. In 1948, he received a first prize in conducting.
Louis de Froment served as music director of orchestras at the casinos of Deauville and Cannes. He also worked as head of the permanent chamber orchestra of the radio in Nice (1958–59), of the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio-Télé Luxembourg (1958–80), and also conducted the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française.
He conducted the premières of the Concerto Breve by Xavier Montsalvatge, with Alicia de Larrocha (piano) and the Barcelona Orchestra in 1953, and of the opera Les caprices de Marianne by Henri Sauguet at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1954.
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