Francis Poulenc & Karol Szymanowski
           Stabat Mater

* Gregorian chant: Stabat mater (6 verses)
* Szymanowski: Stabat Mater^
* Poulenc: Stabat Mater*

Goerke*^ (soprano), Simpson^ (mezzo), Ledbetter^ (baritone)
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Robert Shaw
Total Time: 58:24
Telarc CD-80352

Summary for the Busy Executive: Paradisi gloria.

As far as I know, a unique pairing, but I don't complain, since it
gathers two of my favorite 20th-century works, and not just choral works.
Nevertheless, one marks them as significantly different types - the Poulenc
written in hot blood, the Szymanowski a bit cooler.

Although he kept a life-long admiration for Chopin, Szymanowski as a
composer started out mainly as an heir to Richard Strauss.  He moved to
an Impressionist exoticism - not a favorite genre of mine - and he did
both very well.  One doesn't doubt his compositional chops, regardless of
what one may think of an individual piece.  However, toward the end of the
first world war, he felt himself at a creative impasse.  Knock-off Strauss
or hothouse Orientalism, even well done, becomes beside the point very
quickly, especially when you can get more convincing goods from, say,
Debussy or Strauss himself.  He found his way out - and the way to his
genuine creative self - through Polish folk music and traditions.  He
began not only to compose again, but to compose almost all the masterpieces
that keep his name alive for us.  He began to write music that not only
expressed himself but really mattered, and he finally became able to bring
Chopin into his own work.  His Stabat Mater ranks as one of the early
masterpieces of his final, nationalist period.  The work springs less
from a religious inspiration than a nationalistically poetic one.  After
all, Poland, after more than a hundred years of partition among Germany,
Austria, and Russia, had only recently become reconstituted as a state, its
national identity - in lieu of a Polish government - kept alive through its
language, art, music, folk traditions, and especially Polish Catholicism.
Significantly, Szymanowski began the work as a "peasant mass," which
betrays a folklorist and even an exotic, rather than purely religious,
impulse.

I first encountered the work through a score.  I walked in on a
grad-student friend of mine rehearsing his part for the local town-and-gown
chorus.  I puzzled at the opening, full of sharps and flats in what looked
like the "wrong" places, but showing an obvious logic, and - although I can
usually hear the harmony I "read" - I had little idea how it would sound.
At any rate, I showed up for the performance and was completely blown away.
It evoked for me the martyrs and hermits of the early church, the ones who
sat on columns or lived among the desert rocks and caverns.  I immediately
bought the only available recording - a Polish Muza LP which still sits on
my shelves, about thirty years later.

I also very clearly remember my second live hearing, sometime in the early
90s.  Libor Pesek led the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in Severance Hall.
This time, even though I knew what would come, it blew me away again.  The
opening moved me to tears.  Very few pieces work on me this way.  At any
rate, I've gone rather nuts over collecting CDS of it and own Stryja and
Polish forces on Marco Polo (probably also on Naxos, according to
EveryCD.com), Rattle on EMI (apparently no longer available in the U.S.),
Wislocki on Koch, and now this recording.  I'll comment on the performance
a bit later.

I had the great good fortune of singing Poulenc's Gloria the year after it
came out.  My public government-run high-school choir did it, and through
several months rehearsal I got to know it pretty well.  This introduced me
to Poulenc's music, which immediately become one of the chief joys of my
life.  Why not? As Ned Rorem once wrote, "The very nature of Poulenc's art
is to be liked and understood." I bought all the LPS I could afford with
paper-route and summer-job money and became strongly attracted to the EMI
recordings of George Pretre, who at that time performed Poulenc as if
that composer were the greatest of the century.  In addition to a blazing
recording of the Gloria and Organ Concerto, Pretre also released what
remains for me the best recording of Poulenc's Stabat Mater, with French
Wagnerian soprano Regine Crespin as soloist.  As far as I know, it never
made it to CD (the later recording with Barbara Hendrix comes nowhere close
to that first time out).  The work itself seems to me Poulenc's finest, the
summit of perhaps the greatest religious music of the century, certainly
some of the best since Haydn.

If Szymanowski evokes the intense mystical asceticism of the early
Hellenic Church, Poulenc brings to mind the example of St.  Francis, God's
troubadour.  Poulenc began as a member of Les Six, with mainly short Dada
pieces somewhat recalling Satie.  However, he did hanker to widen his
range, a fairly difficult task since, unlike Szymanowski, he had very
little formal training.  Poulenc composed essentially by improvising at the
piano.  Improvisation is fine for short pieces, but it tends to lead to
fairly loose longer ones, like a rubber band all untwisted.  Rather than an
argument that moves the listener along, one tends to get "one thing after
another." The improviser has a couple of choices:  either to pull up his
socks and learn how Brahms and Beethoven did it or to come up with very
interesting sections.  To some extent, Poulenc did both.  Following Ravel's
advice, he modeled some of his major works on the structure of previous
masterpieces.  Mozart became a favorite source, although Poulenc's
structural borrows were never more than the minimum scaffolding.  Where
Mozart would relate his sections thematically, Poulenc simply contrasted
his sections.  It also happened that Poulenc turned out one of the greatest
melodists of all time, and it seems churlish to complain when he keeps
hitting you with "A" material.  In the 1930s, after the death of a friend,
the cosmopolitan Poulenc rediscovered his Catholic faith.  He didn't
intellectually wrestle with himself.  His faith co-existed with his
hedonism (the composer Ned Rorem remarked that Poulenc's appetites - all
of them - were enormous), and the music reflects this dualism.  For me,
it's the music's glory.  Poulenc had another problem to overcome:  how to
write in a serious vein without sacrificing his style.  He came up with
an amalgam of 16th-century choral style and Stravinsky, particularly the
Stravinsky of Oedipus Rex, a work of enormous influence on several French
composers.  Throughout the Stabat Mater one comes across Poulenc's
appropriations from the earlier work.  Even at the very beginning, the bass
accompaniment derives from Oedipus's opening chorus changed from triple to
duple time.

Poulenc publicly attributed the inspiration of his Stabat Mater to a
commission from the Strasbourg Festival and the death of the painter
Christian Berard.  However, Wilfrid Mellers's study of the composer
(Oxford University Press) reveals the actual inspiration to have been
the death of Poulenc's lover Lucien Roubert, a highly unstable young man
who also managed through his tantrums to drive the composer himself close
to a nervous breakdown.  The work became for Poulenc an exorcism of the
maleficent spirit of Lucien as well as a preparation for Poulenc's grand
opera Dialogues des Carmelites.  Why a Stabat mater? The task of composing
a unified "Dies irae" made Poulenc shy from a full requiem.  The looser
stanzas of the Stabat mater text allowed him to follow Renaissance and
Baroque liturgical practice of cutting up the text into smaller, discrete
units.  Also, the apocalyptic vistas of the requiem mass were foreign to
Poulenc's artistic temperament.  The anguish of Mary at the foot of the
cross gave Poulenc an image of human contact with both death and the
divine.  The music ranges from the solemn opening ("Seldom has a minor
triad sounded so irremediably minor" - Mellers) to ecstatic, child-like
dances, to long, unaccompanied stretches for chorus that bring to mind the
strength of a Mantegna painting.  Its grief runs deep.  Its joy is almost
manic.  Its warmth hugs you like a heavy comforter.  Poulenc said of
himself that his religion was as "simple as a peasant's." He probably
didn't think about it or go through the Daedalan twists of most educated
moderns.  It was part of him to an extent not only beyond most of us, but
inconceivable to most of us.  The music heals because it doesn't ignore its
painful inspiration and accepts heaven straightforwardly and sincerely as
a fact, like a glass of wine.

Shaw's Telarc performances swing between the dull and the wonderful.  His
Elijah hasn't a clue.  His Berlioz Requiem turns that wild and wooly work
into a Victorian Official Portrait, even though his live performance raised
one's hair.  On the other hand, he did a beautiful Poulenc choral disc,
loving readings of the Faure and Durufle Requiems, and some splendid a
cappella work with the Robert Shaw Chamber Singers, the last recalling the
heady days of the Robert Shaw Chorale.  Szymanowski and Poulenc bring out
all his musical virtues:  crisp rhythm, clear textures, and sumptuous
choral sound without sacrificing intelligibility.  To this, one notes a
trait not often found in Shaw's later performances:  intensity, evident
even in the opening unison of the men's voices singing the Gregorian chant.
The intensity never becomes hokey and the perfect intonation adds to the
rapt beauty of the tune.  From the meanderings of the chant arise the
sinuous twists of Szymanowski's solo winds.  The soprano soloist enters,
then the choir, and suddenly we discover ourselves inside a heart-piercing
rapture and a musical language from an ancient, forgotten people.  Even the
relatively quick passages of the work process in a stately way rather than
fly, and Shaw pulls off the trick of keeping everything moving toward the
blazing chords of the penultimate section and the quiet benediction of the
conclusion.  The ravishing harmony of the final invocation of Christ and
"the glory of Paradise" brings to mind the very similar chorales of
Bernstein's Mass.  Bernstein, of course, stole from everywhere to create
highly original music, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he indeed
knew the Szymanowski.

Shaw's advocacy of Poulenc has long been regarded as something special, not
least by the composer himself. Ned Rorem reports in his recollections of the
composer:

   And, like artists, he was also a child; his self-absorption was
   stupefying.  I recall once in Cannes his monologue to a baffled
   bartender about a series of triumphant modulations he had penned
   that afternoon.  I remember also a river of tears as he listened to
   a record of his own Stabat Mater.  "Robert Shaw," he wept, "is the
   greatest performer of our time:  his tempi correspond to the very
   motion of my blood."

I don't think of the latter as self-absorption.  It's simply that composers
find a performer wholly in tune with their music so rarely, that they can
be pardoned for occasionally going over the top.  Shaw's 1963 Severance
Hall memorial for Poulenc remains a high point of my concertgoing life.
Poulenc's Stabat Mater is highly episodic - in eleven or twelve movements,
depending on how you count, as opposed to Szymanowski's six movements.
Many of the sections shift by semitones, which adds to the feeling of
"starting over." Szymanowski habitually reaches across a longer span.  In
addition, Poulenc contrasts moods sharply, even within sections.  Shaw
plays (and wins) a double game:  finding the proper tone for each section
- from grief to anger to radiance to serenity to mixtures drawn from all
of these moods; finding and presenting the coherence of the work.  The
work does indeed cohere, but extraordinarily subtly, more by musical
symbols (particularly the rising minor third) than by classical procedures.
Despite one glaring instrumental flub (presto semitonal triplets on a
trombone!) in the "Quis est homo" movement, this performance ranks as one
of Shaw's very best.  It may lack the weight of Pretre's first recorded
account, but on the other hand it never bogs down, and the choral work -
as one would expect - blows everybody else out of the water.  As in the
Szymanowski, Shaw comes up with an account that means every note, in this
case as deeply as Poulenc must have felt every note.  Poulenc doesn't
indulge in a nostalgic antiquarianism.  The old modes jostle freely against
Debussyian and even blues harmonies.  He takes these elements because they
trace the currents of his psyche.  As I say, Szymanowski keeps more of a
distance.

People might want to know how Shaw compares with other recordings I've
heard.  I've not heard a bad recording of the Szymanowski.  Wislocki's
reading strikes me as "soupier," although it has the advantage of native
Polish speakers.  The soprano soloist, Stefania Woytowicz, swoops a bit
excessively, I find, from one note to the next, and the orchestra seems to
catch this style from her.  Shaw's forces sing and play at a far higher
level.  Stryja on Marco Polo does much better.  If the performance has been
transferred to Naxos, this is a fine, inexpensive alternative.  I prefer
Shaw's clarity, brisker pace, and Telarc's sound.  Shaw's soloists are
better.  Christine Goerke's opening solo in the Szymanowski will rapture
you out.  Marietta Simpson's full, rich contralto never degenerates into
wobble.  Victor Ledbetter's baritone can both ring out like a hero when
called upon while tinged with the darker colors of a true bass.  Shaw's
choir is a lot better.  Stryja's level of intensity rises just as high,
however.  Rattle surprised me with a curiously uninvolved, very well-played
reading.  Nothing's wrong with it, but nothing goes particularly well,
either.  Certainly, the radiance of the work burns at a lower level than
in any of the other recordings.

As for the Poulenc, EMI should release the first Pretre.  Forget the
second.  Forget as well Ozawa's totally clueless reading on DGG of both
the Stabat Mater and the Gloria.  Ozawa has done well by Poulenc, just not
here.  Pesek (my copy:  a Japanese Supraphon release) is quite fine, but
not as good as Shaw, and unless you want the Honegger Christmas cantata
coupled with it, there's no reason to instigate a special search, with
special prices to match.  On Harmonia Mundi, Baudo leads French forces in
a highly idiomatic performance similar to Pretre's first, but of course
without Crespin and without Shaw's animated rhythms and attention to
detail.  Hickox on Virgin Classics is let down by his choir; the
Westminster Singers put out a strong line, but with mushy diction.  His
soloist, though good, really doesn't match Goerke, of the true, clear,
almost folk-like soprano voice Shaw favored.

Shaw had a long career of mostly distinguished, often inspired
music-making.  This is one of the high points of that career.

Steve Schwartz