French Connection

May 17, 2026 at 4:00 pm

Griffin Concert Hall, Colorado State University, Fort Collins

Hallie Schmidt, soprano

Abbey Mann, dancer, Julia Cooper, choreographer

Michael Todd Krueger, conductor

- Program Notes -

Fanfare – Paul Dukas (1865-1935)

For the 1911 season of the Ballets Russes in Paris, Serge Diaghilev commissioned Paul Dukas to compose a fantastical one-act ballet called La Péri, (The Fairy). In the ballet, King Iskendar steals a magic flower of youth from the fairy. Now full of youthful energy, he falls in love with her, and in cruel twist of fate, she steals the flower back. Dukas composed a brilliant flourish for an orchestral brass section written to focus the audience's attention before the ballet began. The Fanfare is now frequently performed as an independent concert piece.

Tantum ergo - Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy who made his concert debut as a pianist at the age of ten. He studied at the Paris Conservatory and followed a conventional career as a church organist, ultimately filling the post at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris. Despite holding this relatively important position his output of sacred music was not large. The singing of the “Tantum ergo” occurs during the rite of communion in the Catholic church.

Gloria – Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Poulenc was born to a wealthy family. His mother started him on piano at a young age, and he was composing by the time he was seven. Both of his parents died while he was in his teens and all formal plans for a classical education and then admission to the Paris Conservatory did not come to fruition.

Thanks to his childhood friend Raymonde Linossier (an impressive women who was a lawyer, an art historian and a surrealist writer), he met the leading artists and intellectuals of post-World War I Paris. Friends and acquaintances included Cocteau, Satie, Stravinsky, Picasso, Brancusi, Claudel, Eluard, and Apollinaire. His early work Rapsodie nègre (1917) earned him recognition by the members of the so-called “Les Six.” This was never a formal organization, but rather six composers who shared something of a similar aesthetic goal: to write music that was vehemently anti-German, had an element of simplicity in its style, and incorporated elements of popular culture (jazz). The other members of the group were Honegger, Milhaud, Tailleferre, Auric and Durey. Poulenc was unquestionably the most successful of any of the group. Stravinsky helped get his works published and introduced him to impresario Sergei Diaghilev.

The 1930s were a decade of great change in Poulenc’s life. The first change came with the death of Raymonde Linossier. She had turned down his marriage proposal not long before and he mourned her for the rest of his life. Serious financial losses meant that he now had to work for a living, and he began an important collaboration as pianist with baritone Pierre Bernac. But the most significant events were set in motion by the 1936 death of a friend in an automobile accident, composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud. This took place right before Poulenc was due to meet Berna in Uzerche for a working vacation. As soon as Poulenc arrived, he decided to visit the nearby pilgrimage church of Rocamadour with its statue of the Black Virgin. In the chapel, at the foot of the statue, he had a religious or spiritual re-awakening. He re-embraced Catholicism and began to compose sacred music for choirs of all types.

Poulenc’s Gloria was commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation and premiered on 20 January 1961 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Chorus Pro Musica, conducted by Charles Munch. It was supposedly Poulenc’s favorite choral work. The Gloria is a standard part of the Catholic mass from the fourteenth century onwards. While we most often encounter it with its companions Kyrie, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei, stand-alone Gloria compositions exist and they date back to the fourteenth century.

Because the Gloria is one of the longest texts in the mass, composers usually subdivide it into multiple sections. The norm before 1600 was two or three subdivisions. Baroque composers liked more subdivisions: think of Bach with nine in the B minor mass and Vivaldi with a dozen in his Gloria. Poulenc’s Gloria has six movements and while they are unequal in the amount of text they use, they generate three pairs in terms of character: the opening and closing movements each are quite majestic; movements 2 and 4 are somewhat fast in tempo and conversely, movements 3 and 5 provide the necessary slow contrasts and feature a soprano soloist, who returns at the end of movement 6 to provide a serene conclusion to the work.

Poulenc purposely wrote the Gloria in a nontraditional manner and he received criticism for the many places where the mood is not especially devout. The work is not especially easy to sing with a style that has been described as “pointillistic.” Changes of time signature are frequent and dissonances are often unprepared and even daring! Poulenc’s Gloria is cherished among choral singers – perhaps because we hold a tremendous sense of accomplishment in performing the piece well.

The second half of the program was inspired by the George Seurat painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” It is recognized as a leading example of pointillist technique and as a founding work of the neo-impressionist movement. Seurat's composition, painted on a large canvas, includes various Parisians at a park on the banks of the River Seine. It is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.