CRI Music: Opera   

Francis Poulenc was the most prominent member of “Les Six” (“The Six”), a mid-20th-century organization of young French composers which, startingly for the times, included a woman. The music of this group often is seen as a neoclassic reaction against both the musical style of Richard Wagner and the Impressionist music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Erica Miner provides compelling background and striking videos to portray Poulenc’s importance in the history of music. “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” his highly dramatic opera about the mass execution of nuns during the French Revolution, is recognized as one of the most emotionally moving in all of opera.