No. 6

Nearly 30 years ago, six noisy young French composers (Les Six) rebelled against their musical elders, rocked Paris with florists' catalogues and locomotives set raucously to music. Since then, two of the six are all but forgotten. Two more became familiar names to U.S. concertgoers: Darius Milhaud, who constructs brassy, dissonant symphonies at California's Mills College, and Arthur Honegger, a hit the past two summers at Tanglewood. U.S. movie audiences heard Georges Auric's scores in such movies as Caesar and Cleopatra. That left No. 6 unaccounted for. Last week he reached the U.S.

It had taken tall, long-faced Francis Poulenc, 49, a long time to get here ("During the war it was impossible, and before that I was not celebre"). But he was making up for lost time. Unlike many visiting composers, who felt just as sure of themselves with a baton as with a pen, Poulenc wouldn't be caught dead on a podium. Says he, throwing up his hands: "I have no tempo." Instead, Manhattan audiences saw him first as piano accompanist to Baritone Pierre Bernac in a recital of the songs which, along with his religious choral works, have won Poulenc his share of fame. This week, a Carnegie Hall audience would hear him, too, as soloist with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony in his melodic Concert Champetre for piano.

Poulenc (he pronounces it heavily almost as Poolonka) likes to describe himself, with a fast, toothy grin, as "both a saint and a devil." Last year, his frothy, obstetrical opera Les Mamelles de Tiresias --in which one character changes sex on stage and another litters the footboards with a good share of his 40,000 babies--created the noisiest scandal in Paris since the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Like the Rite, however, it is still going strong.

A member of a wealthy chemical trust family, Poulenc is one of few French composers who "escaped" the Paris Conservatoire: at entrance age (18), he was in the French army in World War I. He emerged from World War II France's most popular composer, partly because there was no political blemish on him. He holed up on his 17th Century Vouvray estate (where he also makes wine), refused to play for the Germans, and stalled them off on the production of a new ballet, Les Animaux Modeles, by telling them repeatedly: "Ah, it is not yet finished." Now finished, it is a Parisian favorite.

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