A NOTABLE FRENCH-AMERICAN INNOVATOR HONORED
By Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
and dance
Week of March 1-8, 2009
Vol. 11, No. 72
OAKLAND---With his opus numbers
running to a mind-boggling 400-plus, the prolific French composer
Darius
Milhaud (1892-1974) was the Georg Philipp Telemann of his times, in the
considered opinion of San Francisco musician Ludwig Altman.
Whether a
Telemann or not, Milhaud
(pronounced Me Yo) was considerably more---he was one of the most
neglected
innovators of the 20th century. Decades before other
classical
composers “discovered” and launched
their new ideas,
Milhaud had come up with spatial music,
improvisation,
polytonality, seven-minute operas, and songs on arbitrary texts (once,
drawing improbably from
an agricultural catalogue). He introduced American jazz and Brazilian
dance rhythms
to Parisian concert halls. He wrote two distinct string quartets that
could be
played simultaneously as an octet. And, years before John Cage’s
composition of
total silence, he had written a letter he showed me, in which he
inscribed 64
measures of silence to portray the uncommunicative nature of his
correspondent
and friend Germain Prévost.
Milhaud was
quirky,
unorthodox and iconoclastic in his earlier years, bringing to bear a
cocked-hat
insouciance and joyous nature that bubbled forth despite the painful,
crippling
arthritis that lamed him most of his career. However French he was, the
death
of President John F. Kennedy moved him profoundly; he wrote the concise
musical epitaph “Murder
of a Great Chief of State” for orchestra on commission in the space of
a feverish, passionate
48 hours.
At Mills College,
where Milhaud spent three decades off and on starting in 1940, they
paid homage
with an all-Milhaud chamber-orchestra program Feb. 28 as the keystone
of a
music festival coincident with the reopening of the Littlefield Concert
Hall.
It was a
sincere if
inconsistent tribute, having little to do with the assigned title,
“Milhaud’s
Brazilian Connection,” and showing only limited segments of the
composer’s
innovations. Its high point came with the Percussion
Concerto (1928-30),
a true wake-up call powered by soloist/timpanist WilliamWinant, and
further
fueled by the raucousness and inrreverence of trombone and trumpet.
Just eight
minutes long, it opens with a crash yet ends in a subtle pianissimo,
fading out
with surprising subtlety.
“Five Etudes”
for chamber
ensemble and piano soloist (Robert Schwartz) showed the best of
polytonality,
where harmonies are played in two or more keys at once, as clashing as
an
orange tie with a red shirt, a sonic jumble reflective of a facile,
nonconformist mind.
The 20-minute
“Carnival d’Aix”
was yet more joyous in its jaunty drive, where you can almost visualize
a
dancing, prancing parade of clowns, entertainers and jugglers in Aix en
Provence, France (reminiscent of similar celebrants these days in San
Francisco). It brings on abrupt stops and starts, a humorous salvo of
tuba, Julie Steinberg filling in a big piano part, and
the composer having a lot of fun tweating the blue-noses with his éclat.
Like many
other dances, it
runs on too long for the concert hall, but it does feature Latin
American
sounds via a habañera and tango, with violins strummed as if
they were guitars.
Imagine a
secular counterpart
to Haydn’s “The Creation,” and you have Milhaud’s “Cantata for the
Inauguration
of the Museum
of Man” (1937),
featuring an effective
intercollegiate chorus along with less effective soloists; the
narration in perfect French diction was by Jacinthe
Harbec, taking on the role originally interpreted by the wife/actress
Madeleine
Milhaud.
The concert
closed with yet
another dance composition, one of Milhaud’s most popular: “Le boeuf sur
le toit”
(The Steer on the Roof, 1919), named after a Parisian bar. The catchy
number
offers a generous dose of samba recalled from Brazil,
where Milhaud had lived in
1917-18. Pity that the program did not include his music actually from Brazil
(like the beloved “Saudades do Brasil” for piano).
Conductor Nicole Paiement
with her rhythmic acuity of beat and welcome expressiveness was in her
element
here. If the orchestra was a mite unruly veering off-pitch, acribe it
to the devil-may-care
spirit of irreverence in Milhaud's music, still alive on the Oakland campus in a concert that was
unpredictable, imperfect, yet honest. The orchestra was
assembled specifically for the festival, with a combination of the
Mills community and
alums, as well as freelance professionals from the ubiquitous “freeway
philharmonic.”
Festival of Contemporary
Music, Feb. 21-April 5. Next: March 8. Littlefield Concert Hall,
Mills College,
Oakland. For
info: go online.
©Paul Hertelendy 2009
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Paul Hertelendy has been
covering
the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with
relish
-- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never
weakly)
will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with
forays
into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local
artists as well.
#
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