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About this concert
Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir is one of the most beautiful choral works ever written. With these performances, the Netherlands Chamber Choir commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the death of this influential Swiss composer, who lived in Naarden for a long time. As a tribute, the Netherlands Chamber Choir will also perform Martin’s enchanting Songs of Ariel, which he composed for the Netherlands Chamber Choir in 1951. Martin’s brilliant sounds are complemented by Francis Poulenc’s profound Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence. Pouling was another 20th-century composer with whom the choir enjoyed a close relationship. In 1952, Poulenc dedicated the four Christmas motets O Magnum Mysterium to Felix de Nobel, founder of the Netherlands Chamber Choir, who at that time was also its chief conductor.
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Francis Poulenc
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Frank Martin
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Peter Dijkstra
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About the venue

Muziekgebouw is Amsterdam's concert hall for contemporary and newly composed music as well as related genres such as classical, jazz, electronic and global music. More th...
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Francis Poulenc Biography

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (January 7, 1899 - January 30, 1963) was a French composer and a member of the French Group Les Six.

He was a Parisian by birth and death, and always preferred the city to the country. His mother, an amateur pianist, taught him to play, and music formed a part of family life.

Poulenc was a member of Les Six, a group of young French composers, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger and Germaine Tailleferre, who also had links with Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. He embraced the dada movement's techniques, creating melodies that would have been appropriate for Parisian music halls. An outstanding pianist, the keyboard dominated much of his early compositions. He also, throughout his career, borrowed from his own compositions as well as those of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Camille Saint-Saëns.

He composed music in all major genres, including art song, chamber music, oratorio, opera, ballet music and orchestral music. Among Poulenc's last series of major works is a series of works for Winds and Piano. He was particularly fond of the woodwind instruments, and planned a set of sonatas for all of them, yet only lived to complete four: the Flute Sonata (1956), and sonatas for oboe, clarinet and horn.

Poulenc's Rapsodie nègre (1917), written for baritone, piano, string quartet, flute, and clarinet, sets nonsense syllables purportedly by a black Liberian poet. The piece, dedicated to Erik Satie, kept him out of the Paris Conservatoire, composition teacher Paul Vidal saying, according to Poulenc, "Your work stinks, it's inept, infamous balls... Ah! I see you're a follower of the Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie gang. Well, goodbye!" Stravinsky, hearing of this story, arranged to have the piece printed.

Later in his life, the loss of some close friends, coupled with a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Rocamadour, led him to rediscovery of his faith and resulted in compositions of a more sombre, austere tone. His opera, Les Dialogues des Carmelites was written at this time.

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