Five or so years ago I praised an outstanding and once inexpensive
(now £15.00 on Amazon)
Vox
Double of Milhaud orchestral works. The set shares the same
shelf and encomia despite its lop-sided timings. The lineage of
the recordings can be traced to Pathé-Marconi and all are licensed
from EMI Classics.
On the first and rather slackly filled disc we get three scores
that play well to Bernstein’s strengths, flair and dynamism. We
have heard them before as an
EMI
GROC.
La Création du Monde is warm, dreamy and
volatile. It’s a gunpowder blend of Bachian serenity, refracted
jazz and Brazilian street culture.
Le Boeuf sur le Toit
is a sweaty glorious broth of rapidly changing, brassy
popular music, soft-focus tangos, tangy abrasion, rambunctious
brass and feral chatter. Why Bernstein only recorded four segments
of Milhaud’s thirteen
Saudades do Brasil I do not
know. Still, they play well to his natural predilections though
he can be slower than the composer in the same piece.
The second disc starts with
Scaramouche (1937) written
twenty years after he had been in South America. He never tries
our patience – always the soul of brevity and concision; not at
all the same thing. The outward flanking
Vif and
Brasileira
are done with the pile-driven power of a pianola on steroids.
It’s a romp for Lee and Ivaldi. If there’s exhilaration then we
also get remission in the
Modéré. There’s a touch of Constant
Lambert in the Brasileira – gamin, bright-eyed and bell-rung.
Scaramouche is familiar enough but Lee and Ivaldi then
move to
Le Bal Martiniquais (1944) with its
two movements here shorn of the third. The little
Chanson Creole
carries the temperament of a lullaby and there’s also a strutting
Biguine out of the same joyous stream as the
Brasileira
of
Scaramouche. In 1948 came the six movement
Paris
for four pianos; Lee and Ivaldi are joined by Collard
and Béroff. Again the movements each titled – six of them each
related to landmarks and neighbourhoods of Paris. The music mixes
strutting confidence in a blizzard of notes with gentlest dissonance
as in the intriguing chimes of
L'Isle Saint-Louis. A grand
eighteenth century fugal bell-clashing manner could be heard in
La Tour Eiffel. I wondered about Lee and Ivaldi's somewhat
flat-levelled approach in opp. 165b and 249 but all is redeemed
here with plenty of imaginative attention to dynamics.
Prêtre and his orchestra joins Béroff for
Le Carnaval d'Aix.
This dissolute, march-riven collage of euphoria (
Corso),
nursery rhyme simplicity (
Tartaglia), bluesy subtlety (
Isabelle),
whistling, wheezy, darting Stravinskian energy and cartoonery
blows the cobwebs away. Set beside this a polka that fuses Warsaw
with Rio de Janeiro - Rio wins. The
Souvenir de Rio charts
the carnival spirit from shivering dawn through high noon to satiated
nocturnal exhaustion. In the finale Milhaud takes the subtle line
and makes it at first more of a sigh than a whoop. The street
celebrations finally assert themselves in a spasm of joy. The
remaining thirteen tracks of CD 2 comprise five for
Suite
Francaise (1944) and the remainder for
Suite Provencale
(1936); Milhaud was born in Provence. There's a more serious
spirit at work here as in the miniature mysterious fogbound tone
poems that are
Bretagne and
Alsace-Lorraine for
op. 248. These two long movements bespeak a tenderness for these
regions.
Provence has the celebratory tone of
Ile de
France nicely underlined by the pipe and tabor orchestrational
touches.
Provence is the last movement of
Suite Francaise
and the subject of
Suite Provencale. The latter in
its succinctness, concentration and style is sometimes extremely
redolent of Moeran's antique-accented and rustic-spirited
Serenade.
These two suites will also be familiar to some of you in windband
versions.
The booklet is an exemplar of clarity in design and choice of
font. It should not be necessary to highlight these things - they
should be an unspoken given; experience tells us otherwise and
ironically often in the hands of the major companies. Well done,
Brilliant Classics.
Rob Barnett
Michel Béroff; Jean-Philippe Collard; Christian Ivaldi; Noel Lee
(pianos) 
