Darius Milhaud

This is a nice little selection of the chamber music of Darius Milhaud featuring clarinet, violin, and piano in varying combinations, beginning with the brief Suite for all three instruments. There's a gentleness and wittiness in most of this music – although Milhaud could also be dolorous, for example in the introduction of the Suite's finale – primarily because he drew on themes from his stage music for the Suite, Scaramouche, and the Cinéma fantaisie d'après Le bœuf sur le toit, not to mention the presence of his trademark infectious Brazilian rhythms. The Violin Sonata No. 2 and the Clarinet Sonatina are slightly more serious in mood, and in the case of the Sonatina, more harmonically adventurous. The three musicians here – clarinetist Jean-Marc Fessard, violinist Frédéric Pélassy, and pianist Eliane Reyes – work excellently together to bring the music to life. Their ensemble work in the Suite is sharply precise. Even in the Sonata and Sonatina, there is a sense that it's not all just about the violin or clarinet. Pélassy and Fessard allow Reyes to bring out the piano part to show that the works are often more like true duets, for example in Scaramouche's dizzying opening or the Violin Sonata's Vif movement. The Fantaisie is a more of a duet almost by necessity because there's so much going on in it, but without a doubt it's the violin that gets the spotlight with some fancy effects (such as playing in two keys at once) and even a cadenza that's not in the original work. The three musicians also give detailed attention to coloring in a natural, instinctive-sounding way.

This programme of 1920s French music is in the hands of a conductor who gets right into the spirit of it, and plenty of spirit there is too. Apart from the Ibert, this is ballet music, and that work too originated as a theatre piece, having been incidental music for Eugene Labiche's farce The Italian Straw Hat. Poulenc's unfailingly fresh and bouncy suite from Les biches is very enjoyable although Chandos's warm and resonant recording takes some of the edge off the trumpet tone that is so central to the writing. The geniality of it all makes one forget that this is remarkable music in which (as Christopher Palmer's booklet essay points out) the twentieth-century French composer evokes eighteenth-century fetes galantes through the eyes of that greatest of nineteenth-century ballet composers, Tchaikovsky.

The symphonies date from a more mature period of Darius Milhaud compositional life and confronts the listener with music he or she probably didn't expect if one is familiar with the more bizarre, witty, early music with its many influences by light music, like Le Boeuf sur le Toit and La Creation du Monde. The sixth symphony of Milhaud is definitively his greatest. It contains two slow and two fast movements. The slow movements (2/3rd of the music) are of an astonishing beauty! This music of wide open spaces is full of calmness, austerity, clarity, with beautiful changing harmonies and slowly spiralling melodies. The fast movements make a lively contrast to this.

French intellectuals, especially musicians and writers, were enchanted by the magic of Richard Wagner's music, but they earnestly wanted to pursue new ideas for what might follow. They believed that music and art should be free from 'German elements' and they consequently wanted to establish a decidedly contrasting, French style of music. It was for this reason that Gabriel Fauré and Camille Saint-Saëns set up the Societé Nationale de Musique in 1871, tasking it with supporting new French compositions. Successive composers were fascinated by new developments in the great French music tradition and experimented with modal alternatives and aspects of counterpoint. Compositional clarity was expected to express the simple but poetic relationship between music and text, drawing on graceful melodic lines and a Renaissance-like serenity of expression.

Many classical music listeners will be familiar with the name Darius Milhaud, but how familiar are they with his output? The owner of a bold, individual style, Milhaud was active for much of the 20th century, a modernist who is counted among the group of composers known as Les Six (a term coined by the music critic Henri Collet in 1920) and who was much influenced by jazz, polytonality as well as the sounds of Brazil. Bringing together many of his orchestral works, some of which are conducted by the composer himself, this release is the perfect starting-point for those wishing to become acquainted with his art.

This programme reflects a personal journey: I am Belgian, I studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and now I live in France. I wanted to present composers from these three countries, taking as my cornerstone the English song repertory and the English language. It was Britten’s On this Island that started me thinking in this direction. William Walton’s Daphne and Ivor Gurney’s tiny but intensely fresh Spring touch me enormously and form a part of my life experience.

The present installment of Arturo Sacchetti’s encyclopedic Organ History survey for Arts Music drops anchor in late-19th/early-20th-century France. It can be argued that the five instrumental sections from Satie’s Mass for the Poor that open this recital lose poignancy when shorn of their surrounding vocal movements, although the organ is a perfect instrument for the composer’s quirky, instantly identifiable harmonic language. By contrast, D’Indy’s Les Vêpres du Commun des Saints, Roussel’s Prélude et Fughetta, and Honegger’s Deux Pièces pour Orgue make an arid, academic impression. After Wayne Marshall’s pulverizing speed through the Pastorale by Roger-Ducasse (Virgin Classics), Sacchetti’s relatively conservative virtuosity proves less engaging. However, his incisive hand/foot coordination enliven Tournemire’s Improvisation on “Te Deum” and Langlais’ Hymne d’Actions de grâces “Te Deum”, although the latter yields to Andrew Herrick’s more vivid and better engineered traversal on Hyperion. Organists looking for an effective, unhackneyed encore should consider Ibert’s Musette or Milhaud’s Pastorale.

Among the most adaptive and flexible – some might say eclectic and facile – of composers, Darius Milhaud was well-equipped to provide stage and ballet music that could set any scene and change moods at a moment's notice. His vivid scores, however, are most often heard today in concert, and without scenarios in hand, some imagination is required to understand how effective these works may have been for the stage. Taken at face value, Le carnaval d'Aix seems like an episodic piano concerto, L'apothéose de Molière a mediocre neo-Baroque pastiche, and Le carnaval de Londres a modern music hall rehash of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.

Astounding debuts and legendary piano treasures on disc: newly remastered albums of 21 pianists from the analogue era, including many first-ever digital transfers.

Astounding debuts and legendary piano treasures on disc: newly remastered albums of 21 pianists from the analogue era, including many first-ever digital transfers.