Louis Durey News
French composer
- opera
- France
- composer, conductor, music critic
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2024-03-20
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2021-10-03 11:37:00
As a Wagner conductor he has no equal
[…] conducted the triumphant first performance of Peter Grimes, an opera composed by pacifist Benjamin Britten and with another pacifist Peter Pears singing the title role. Through the war Goodall had maintained the contacts with Britten started at St Alban’s, Holborn. In fact Goodall had conducted a remarkable chamber concert of works by Les Six in September 1942 when, in addition to Denis Brain playing the horn, Britten had played the celesta in works by Louis Durey, and by Germaine Tailleferre, the only female member of Les Six. The first of the two Britten photos above shows the composer with Rudolf Bing and the baritone Edmund Donlevy who sung the role of Ned Keene in the first performance of Peter Grimes, while the lower shows Britten at a 1945 rehearsal of the opera with Goodall, the producer Eric Crozier and the designer Kenneth Green.In 1944 Goodall joined Sadler Wells Opera, and […]
2021-07-19 13:45:36
Francis Poulenc, guest post, 2021
[…] style. During Poulenc’s time with Vines, he was introduced to many composers, among them Satie and Auric. Vines helped Poulenc network and hone his art as a performing pianist. Les Six. Les Six was a group of six French musicians. And yep! Their name pays homage to the nationalistic Russian group titled ‘The Five.’ This group (Les Six) was formed by Satie himself in the year 1919. The members of Les Six include Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Poulenc himself, and the only woman, Germaine Tailleferre. Poulenc joined this group of composers and helped to collaborate on the 1920 album (fittingly named) L’Album des Six. Shortly after this, five of the six members (including Poulenc) worked together to create the collection titled Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel. In this collection, Poulenc wrote a polka, as well as the piece La Baigneuse de Trouville. The collaboration itself was […]
2021-06-01 07:05:18
What they did next: music from L'Album des Six alongside song cycles written after the six composers went their separate ways
Les Six - Auric, Durey, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, Tailleferre; Franziska Heinzen, Benjamin Mead; Solo Musica Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 28 May 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★) A soprano and piano duo look at the composers of Les Six through the mirror of what each got up to laterThe grouping of composers known as Les Six was loose at best, five men and one woman who were roughly of an age and who knew each other and who, in 1920 in Paris, shared something of the era's Avant Garde. Darius Milhaud would later maintain that the grouping of the six was entirely arbitrary, but both Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau seem to have been godfathers, with the amazing melange of the arts, visual, aural and more, which characterised 1920s Paris. All six composers, Georges Auric (1899–1983), Louis Durey (1888–1979), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), […]
2020-11-29 12:52:49
A Life On-Line: Orpheus in suburbia, Paris in the 1920s, Britten and Clyne in Perth,
[…] complex. In its latest film presentation, recorded at the National Opera Centre, the London Song Festival presented Les Anées Folles, a portrait of Paris during the Twenties with soprano Francesca Chiejina, baritone Ashley Riches, pianist Nigel Foster, plus narrations from Nick Delvalle and video projections from James Symonds. Nigel Foster cast his net widely for the songs, and we heard music by Les Six of course - Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Louis Durey, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, their 'godfather' Erik Satie, plus other contemporaries Charles Koechlin, Georges Hue, Albert Roussel, Vincent Scotto, Henri Sauget, and Reynaldo Hahn. This was a real picture of musical Paris in the 1920s and to counterpoint it a series of readings from Ernest Hemingway, Janet Flanner, George Orwell and others which provided a sometimes startling counterpoint to the songs, adding salacious moments, dark corners and simply eye-catching content. I really missed seeing […]
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