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With the programme Mirrored / Miroirs, Cappella Amsterdam and pianist Julien Libeer pay tribute to Maurice Ravel, 150 years after his birth. They combine Ravel’s masterworks with music from his contemporaries, Gabriel Fauré and Francis Poulenc. Highlights include Libeer’s arrangement of the Adagio from Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G for piano and choir, and the swinging energy of Gershwin’s Summertime and I Got Rhythm. French elegance blends with American vitality. Julien Libeer and Cappella Amsterdam made quite an impression at the Muziekgebouw a few years ago, when they performed the Bach tribute The Well-Tempered Songbook: ‘Downright sensational’, wrote Klassik Heute. In March 2025, the adventurous Libeer presented a solo recital featuring the music of Ravel, combining the compositions of the latter with music by baroque composer Louis Couperin and the American composers George Gershwin and George Crumb.
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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.
France
Read MoreHe 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.
France
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