The reasons why Poulenc’s music is today so damnably beautiful but so non 20th century are to be traced back to his artistic collocation, wilfully anti-intellectua - where intellectualism was intended as a sterile tendency - and fastidiously versatile. Francis Poulenc never conceded himself to the fashions of his time. Fashions with which he had to in any case confront himself, having been born in 1899 (in that year Schönberg wrote the courageous if still not atonal Transfigured Night) and having started studying composing at the turn of the century, when Stravinskij had already burst forth with his Sacre du Printemps. If, however, the Russian composer had wanted to visit in depth that which was the world of contemporary music and that past, the work of Poulenc always kept such an equilibrium as to make it impossible to classify as modern, and all the less as neoclassical. And neoclassicism, which it is customary to attribute to the period between the two wars, is to be read, more than as a recovery of formal 17th century tradition, as a refusal of late romanticism. The reason why Poulenc joined the “Group of Six” (a group of friends with perspectives and results far inferior to those of the “Group of Five” in Russia) was to leave behind definitively the inheritance of the music of the previous century that with Saint-Saëns, for example, was still very present in France. But, as Milhaud and the others, Poulenc was, in terms of innovation, different also to that Satie in which the whole group reflected itself as the champion of a sense of aesthetics both ironic and dry. These aspects have long been misunderstood and exchanged for attitudes of superficiality. In truth there remains a refinement and taste so French, the same as those typical of Couperin, Berlioz and the albeit distant Ravel and Debussy. Furthermore, Poulenc had the rare gift of melody. His lyrical sensibility paradoxically accosts him to those romantics from whom neoclassicism so stood back. If we for example think to Bartok, so poorly gifted in this sense, we could almost say that romanticism (which is not sentimentalism) is an attitude, and Poulenc possessed it. It percolates out of all his compositions, above all in those vocal, in which, like a perfect tailor, he dressed in music the words of Apollinaire, Éluard and Jacob. Much like a good pop musician might do today. The fact is that, even if unknowingly, he wrote what the people liked, and the success achieved by keeping on the fence between the tonal system and rich chromatics had him pass for a fashionable musician who was easy to understand. In truth, behind each and every one of his works there is all the study of one who knows the job but it is never so exasperated as to make the soul succumb under a thick mantle of geometry. At an idealistic level, however, Poulenc never incarnated the mythical figure of the romantic genius nor that of the child prodigy. He grew artistically speaking in a linear manner (he wrote more and better at thirty than he did at twenty); he studied piano with the Spaniard Ricardo Viñes, to whom are dedicated the Trois Piecès, and perfected his composing skills with Charles Koechlin. He never wanted to pass for a virtuoso of his instrument, though he played extremely well, and was also distant from the stereotype of the exhibitionist, being a professional pianist more as an accompanier than a soloist. And this way of his of playing the piano in a reserved, almost shy manner, can be found also in these recordings in which, in the pieces for violoncello and piano, Pierre Fournier is always more evident than him. The whole CD constitutes an important occasion not only in which to listen to some pieces played by the selfsame author – and this should not surprise one, given that he is not the only musician (the case of Rachmaninov is instructive) to have benefited, as of the thirties, of the invention of the record – but also to get to know a repertoire not so frequented. The recordings were done at the RAI studios in March 1953 and sent on air in numerous occasions in the so called “National Programme” and “Third Programme”. The Trois Piecès for piano, written in 1928, are a clear message from the author that he had no intention of succumbing to the dodecaphonic system. The bright harmonies that wink to a dissonant note here and there are the fruit of a school more typical of his fellow nationals than of the radicalism of central Europe. The interpretation of the wonderful piece by Schumann Phantasiestücke op. 73, is instead marvellously surprising, full of a lyricism of which Fournier and Poulenc, albeit at times dissonant, make themselves excellent bards. The violoncello, decisive and impassioned, is indeed a sign of that very romanticism so detested at the start to the last century. So very contrasting instead are the Sonata by Debussy and Stravinskij’s Suite Italienne from Pulcinella that follow. Most modern the first, neoclassical – truly – the second. In Debussy the attention is drawn to the audacious brilliance of the piano but curious in the violoncello which goes back to being dark, a résumé of role and script in Starvinskij’s Pulcinella. In the same way the instrument becomes the protagonist of the lament of the heartrending Sérénade, in which that marked propensity to song that was the fortune and the damnation of Poulenc emerges in all its drama. With the choreographic concert Aubade, the portrait of the musician is completed and framed. Written in 1929 for piano and small orchestra, it was conceived as a ballet for a single ballerina who was to impersonate Diana the huntress, goddess of chastity, in which the pianist, incapable of facing his own homosexuality, reflected his alter ego. But it is a serene piece. In the splendour of the andante, with the theme entrusted to a sensual clarinet, all doubts are dissipated. Poulenc then applies modernity entrusting himself to the melody and harmonies frequented, so as to have us understand today the importance of rediscovering the known.