Hyperion Records

Among the earliest Poulenc mélodies are Trois Poèmes de Louise Lalanne. Apollinaire chose this name in order to masquerade as a female poet in the pages of the literary review Marges. Montparnasse laziness got the better of him however, and he rifled through the literary jottings of his mistress in order to find something suitably feminine to meet his publishing deadline. Apollinaire’s loving collaborator was none other than the painter Marie Laurencin (1885–1956; a painting by her is on the cover of this booklet) who designed the costumes and sets for Poulenc’s first great success, the ballet Les Biches, presented by Diaghilev in 1924. Laurencin had been enthusiastically ‘discovered’ by Apollinaire in his role as influential art critic. In this song-set only the whirlwind nonsense of Chanson is by him. Le présent (where Poulenc is influenced by the implacable last movement of Chopin’s B flat minor Sonata) and Hier are Laurencin’s words. Hier is the first of Poulenc’s mélodies to employ the lyrical vein in which so many of his best songs were to be written. By 1931 when it was composed, Poulenc’s roaring twenties were behind him. The clown and ragamuffin shows in this song that he is capable of melancholy things, and he chooses the style of a smoke-filled room of a Paris boîte (the ghost of Piaf’s predecessor, Marie Dubas, hovers) to make his tender revelation.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 1985