At the end of 1940, after Paris had fallen under German occupation, the spectacularly refined French composer Francis Poulenc made a musical setting of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Sanglots,” or ...

Fifty years ago today, French composer Francis Poulenc had a massive heart attack in his Paris apartment and died. He was only 64, but he left us with an assortment of durable music that still ...

Tonight, pianist Gila Goldstein performs a recital at Boston University including Francis Poulenc’s Improvisation No. 15. The 1959 piece, last in a series of Improvisations spanning Poulenc’s career, ...

I used to hide my perplexity at the music of Francis Poulenc for fear of being thought a bad homosexual. Perhaps if I had known back then the music on a new disc of Poulenc’s chamber music (Onyx), ...

A review of Poulenc: A Biography by Roger Nichols. Poulenc’s personality in and outside his music is plumbed in Poulenc: A Biography by Roger Nichols, a celebrated British scholar. As a composer, ...

On a performance by Paul Jacobs & the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, of the organ concerto by Francis Poulenc. In my forthcoming chronicle for the magazine, I have a ...

Poulenc: A Biography, Roger Nichols, Yale, 372 pages, June 2020; Poulenc: The Life in the Songs, Graham Johnson, Liveright, 608 pages, June 2020. “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” – ...

Two entertaining biographies reveal a complex composer, whose music – like his colourful life – melded the incompatible Imagine Roger Nichols and Graham Johnson at a dinner party, discussing the ...

You may think of the French composer Francis Poulenc as a witty neo-classicist, especially in his chamber music from the 1920s. But by the end of his life, the iconoclastic former member of Les Six ...

Cellist Young In Na graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2019. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the New England Conservatory. Young In performs two pieces from French composer ...

Nothing was so amusing to French Composer Francis Poulenc as hearing his friends marvel at the quilt of contradictions that masked his music and his life. “I am half-monk, half-bounder,” he would say, ...

Poulenc wrote music that popped like corks from Champagne, dizzy with the sounds of Parisian music halls and jazz. Yet he also channeled great... Fifty years ago today, French composer Francis Poulenc ...