The world of Milhaud is
increasingly well served with only his operas being largely
neglected. His symphonies and string quartets have been recorded
complete by CPO and Naïve respectively. DG had two very attractive
discs of four of his thirteen symphonies then stopped. There
is also a stunning and far too easily overlooked VoxBox that
collects all the chamber symphonies in gutsy yet yielding
performances and recordings. Dutton and a host of other small
labels have all added to the bubbling soup. Now along come
Divine Art with a disc packed full with a connoisseur’s selection
of historic recordings. The non nonsense sound shows the
sort of attentive and skilled remastering that makes Divine
Art’s vintage Sibelius symphonies disc such a refreshing
experience.
The four movement Trio places
the dignified Bachian melancholy of the second movement alongside
an Ouverture that rattles and sways with the rumba
of a street carnival. Milhaud is a great one for the gamin
twinkle in the eye here carried by the clarinet in movements
I and III. The finale finds a terrible Handelian seriousness
bordering on tragedy but relaxes drastically to recapture
the cheekiness of the street urchin. The piece was culled
from Milhaud’s incidental music for Anouilh’s play Le
Voyageur sans Baggages.
Small-scale chamber music
is then left behind with Monteux’s 1945 recording of the Protée suite.
Here the pre-echoes and echoes of Stravinsky, Honegger (Pacific
231) and Mossolov (Steel Factory) can be heard
in the Ouverture and the Final. Some of this
is frankly mechanistic. I would not have been surprised to
hear a Varese siren at times or one of Mossolov’s massive
suspended steel sheets being hammered. Apparently there were
riots at several Milhaud premieres in the 1920s. To offset
the occasional emotional obduracy Milhaud deploys his signature
rumba-tango rhythms at various points a la Villa-Lobos. There
is also a staggeringly graceful Nocturne with a prominent
troubadour role for the woodwind principals in turn. The Chamber
Symphony No. 3 with a vintage elite English team
is playful yet seasoned with peppery dissonance. The lapping Calme movement
provides respite.
Until this point we have
been listening to recordings made in 1952, 1945, 1936. The
Westminster recordings from 1950 Vienna that fill out the
rest of the disc sound beefily clean, clear and honest -
full of strongly registered detail. The VSO throw themselves
into an idiom which they must have found uncongenial. I
wonder whether Henry Swoboda had to work hard to secure these
convincingly idiomatic performances; I suspect so. The neo-classical Serenade is
wild and woolly, echoing with Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.
The Five Studies are little genre pieces of
which the Doucement starts in an echo of Ravel’s Pavane but
soon becomes a subtle essay in dissonant suggestion. Sombre is
also full of aggression, threat and dissolution. The final Romantique again
wrong-foots the listener by starting smilingly playful but
then throwing in all sorts of wrong-note gaminess and queasy
harmonic touches. It is comparable to a wildly dissonant
marriage of Walton’s Façade and Stravinsky’s Concerto
for Piano and Winds. The seven movement suite of Maximilien music
is drawn from a 1930s opera of the same name about the proud
Mexican emperor and his downfall brought about by the hero
Juarez. The Dies Irae is let loose through the opening
march. There is some cheeky playfulness (Interlude 3) as
we would expect from Milhaud but much of this music is alive
with clashing tonalities, truculence and dark inimical storms
on the horizon. Again the shadow of Igor Markevitch’s coldly
impressive music passes across the score. The disc ends with Three
Rag Caprices, the first of which is sensationally
Bliss-like (Conversations); the Romance is
remarkably tender and unequivocal for a change. The final
sappy caprice has jazzy howls, Weill-like sarcasm, pizzicato
playfulness and sudden romantic interjections by the strings.
More please, Divine Art.
Perhaps you could do the same for an unhackneyed selection
of early recordings of Honegger, Prokofiev or Stravinsky.
The twelve page booklet
gives full discographical details and plentiful written background
on the composer and the works.
This is a distinctive
entry in the Milhaud lists. These are comparatively early
works and valuable for that. Milhaud speaks in a language
shot through with Latin-American carnival, peppery dissonance,
jazzy insouciance, nervy neo-classicism, pastoral repose
and souped up, whooping, if strangely cold, exuberance.
Rob Barnett
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Jacques Parrenin (violin),
Ulysse Delecluse (clarinet), Annette Haas-Hamburger (piano) (Trio) 
