Francis Poulenc - Métamorphoses [With score]

-Composer: Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) -Performers: Catherine Dubosc (Voice) Pascal Rogé (Piano) Métamorphoses for Voice and Piano, FP 121, written in 1943 00:00 - I. Reine des mouettes {Queen of the gulls} 01:04 - II. C&ainsi que tu es {That&how you are} 03:11 - III. Paganini This is a quick and breezy cycle of three songs by Francis Poulenc (1899 -- 1963). If the opening and especially the last song are too rapid and breezy, the middle song is one that rises to the standards Poulenc set as one of the greatest of French song composers. It is not unusual that the poetess was a friend of Poulenc&-- early in his career he decided to write songs to texts of living poets whom he knew personally. His biographer Benjamin Ivry points out that like Schubert he sometimes set works of minor poets because he liked the particular writer. Poulenc wrote three song cycles and one separate song on poems by Louise de Vilmorin. This poet was one of Poulenc&favorite people, as he wrote in Journal de mes melodies (Diary of My Songs), his invaluable commentary on almost all his songs, "...because she is beautiful, because she is lame [she had a limp], because she writes innately immaculate French, because her name evokes flowers and vegetables, because she loves her brothers like a lover and her lovers like a sister." He also liked, in her poetry, its qualities of "sensitive audacity,...wantonness,...avidity which extended into song...." Others were not...