A skip across the Channel: Poulenc in London
The French composer Francis Poulenc was no stranger to London. Over the course of his life he made intimate connections with orchestras, audiences and critics in the city that warmly received his music throughout the mid-twentieth century and beyond. A composer of ballets, chamber music, piano works, operas and choral music, he had a natural tendency towards the fluid yet fragile quality of the human voice and its infinite capacity for devotion, as demonstrated in the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites and pieces such as La voix humaine and Gloria. A man known for his sense of humour that permeated his music, he was a devout Catholic, and his religious feelings can be felt most keenly in his choral repertoire.
