MILHAUD conducts his Quatre Saisons & Saudades de Printemps (1956/58) - PASC272

It might seem odd to refer to Darius Milhaud as a “difficult” composer considering that he wrote such easy-to-digest music as Le Boeuf sur la toit, La Création du monde, the Suite provençale, Suite française, Scaramouche, and Saudades do Brasil—tuneful, colorful pieces spiced with “wrong” notes—but they are typical of his output only in their relative brevity. Milhaud reputedly advised Burt Bacharach not to “be afraid of writing something people can remember and whistle. Don’t ever feel discomfited by a melody.” In the sense that his music is full of melody, it could be said that Milhaud took his own advice, but, very often, the melodies are absorbed into dense, busy counterpoint, with more than one tune playing at the same time and often in different keys (polytonality), even major and minor ones at the same time (polymodality).

When he isn’t writing in his popular style, his music requires serious and, sometimes, repeated listening. Sometimes, repeated hearings will enable a listener to “get” a piece, but there are no guarantees; there are going to be pieces that one will never like no matter how many times one listens to them. Given a composer who compiled more than 440 opus numbers, this shouldn’t be surprising. I suspect all of us harbor at least a modicum of suspicion toward prolific music machines like Milhaud, Hovhaness, Reger, and Villa-Lobos, who could apparently crunch it out by the sheaf. After all, if Mozart wasn’t “on” 100 percent of the time, why should we expect them to be? Milhaud apparently had such technical command that he could dash off a string quartet in a few hours, with a power of concentration that enabled him to ignore distractions.

Although Milhaud eventually lumped them together as if they constituted a single work, the four concertos that make up The Seasons are not really related to each other; they are individual pieces and should be listened to that way. The Concertino de Printemps, reputedly Milhaud’s favorite of the four, was written for violinist Yvonne Astruc and composed much earlier than the others. If it actually was Milhaud’s favorite, I can understand that, for it’s a cheerful, busy, light-textured workout for the violinist, who is playing nearly all the time. Fortunately it, like the other three, is not a long piece, running 8:44 in this performance by Szymon Goldberg and the composer. The late Mitch Miller used to call concertos of this kind, that give the soloist little rest, “tapeworms.” Even so, I had to listen to the piece nearly a dozen times before it clicked. That’s why I think one should not listen to these little concertos one after the other; they are dense, highly contrapuntal pieces that are not easily digested and, of course, there’s no guarantee that you’ll like them any better after the 12th hearing.

That, in fact, is what happened to me in the case of the Concertino d’Été. Like the others, it has no apparent connection with the season (summer, in this case) in its title and, like the others, keeps its soloist, in this case violist Ernst Wallfisch, quite busy. Somehow, my mind kept wandering as the notes flew by. It struck me as the kind of piece that would be great fun to perform but less fun to listen to. It is also the longest of the four, coming in at 13:27 in this performance. The Concertino d’Automne for two pianos and orchestra was written for the team of Gold and Fizdale but is performed by two French pianists on this recording. Here, the sonority is uncharacteristically thick to the point where it’s difficult to keep up with what’s going on. There are passages where one pianist is pounding away on the melody while the other plays showy octave runs and arpeggios. There are times when the pianists seem to be producing tone clusters. The Concertino d’Hiver has a certain fascination since it’s a rare concerto for trombone; in fact, the only other one I can think of (though I’m sure there are others) is by Nathaniel Shilkret (there’s a pirate Tommy Dorsey/Stokowski recording of it). Once again, the soloist is kept busy and must deal with Milhaud’s apparent affection for writing in the extreme ranges of instruments. Its three movements are played without pause. The second, slow movement has the trombonist playing with a mute. Since I heard no slides at all, I wonder if Maurice Suzan was using a valve trombone. Like the other three concertos, the piece ends abruptly. Trombonists can use all the concertos they can find, and here’s one that would spice up a program without wearing out its welcome.

In the case of the Saudades do Brasil, we hear Milhaud writing in his crowd-pleasing “popular” style. Originally written for the piano, it was inspired by a year Milhaud spent in Brazil as an assistant to Paul Claudel, who was, at that time, the French ambassador. Milhaud later arranged it for piano trio and, when it was used as a ballet, for symphony orchestra. The 12 pieces portray Milhaud’s impressions of various neighborhoods in Rio di Janeiro as well as a few places outside the city. When he orchestrated it for choreographic use, he added an overture. He also reversed the order of Paineras (No. 9) and Sumaré (No. 10). The orchestrated version had previously appeared on CD in a recording by the Basel Chamber Orchestra under Johannes Schläfli, but he omitted Sorocaba (No. 1) and Leme (No. 3), and reversed the order of Larenjeiras (No. 11) and Paysandú (No. 12), apparently to get a flashier ending. Fortunately, its absence from the catalog is now academic with the reappearance of Milhaud’s far superior performance and recording. It’s one of those recordings where you can almost picture the location of the players without its coming off as overproduced.

James Miller

This article originally appeared in Issue 34:6 (July/Aug 2011) of Fanfare Magazine.