SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE
March 18, 2003

The Joyous Din of Milhaud
By Michelle Dulak

Considering the number of decades Darius Milhaud spent writing and teaching here, it's strange that his music isn't much better known and admired in the Bay Area than anywhere else. There are periodic efforts to make tributes, especially (of course) at Mills College, Milhaud's longtime academic home. (I played in one, many years ago, that featured the dense, gnarly Piano Quintet written for Egon Petri in 1951 — in honor of the Mills College centenary — alongside the mysterious and somber Third String Quartet, with soprano, from 1916, a product of the darkest days of the Great War.) But the San Francisco Conservatory's BluePrint Festival, with its two Milhaud-based concerts last Friday, represents the strongest and most serious attempt to honor Milhaud in the Bay Area in many years.
Trying to get at Milhaud's music is terribly difficult, partly because there is so much of it and partly because it's so maddeningly various — not so much in quality (though in a catalog with 443 opus numbers in it there are going to be pieces better and worse) as in manner and in scoring.
The obvious comparison is with Hindemith, a composer of the same generation (Hindemith was born in 1895, Milhaud in 1892) — both were joyously eclectic in their influences, both alarmingly prolific, both driven to flee Europe for America during the Second World War, both settling thereafter into university teaching.

And if you're looking for similarities, you can trace them even into the music. Hindemith (in the 20s and 30s, at least) had a trick of ending a raucously discordant movement suddenly on a seraphic major chord. One of the middle movements of Milhaud's Aspen Serenade does the same — so ingenuously that half the audience to Friday's performance chuckled at it. German humor meets French humor? Cats and dogs living together? Perhaps.
And yet you can divide Hindemith up into compositional strata, so to speak, in a way you can't do with Milhaud. The variety in Hindemith is largely change through time — a compositional personality that altered radically over the decades. The variety in Milhaud is there from the beginning.
In Milhaud there are musical ideas that run like taut threads through his career from one end to the other. The one that stands out to me is the sheer fun of making a ruckus — a deliberate surfeit of sound and color and intentionally antagonistic lines, "too much" on purpose. You hear it in the few orchestral pieces that have made it into "standard rep," like Boeuf sur le toit or Création du monde. But it's everywhere, in pieces that have nothing to do with jazz or dance. The 1919 Machines agricoles (for soprano and chamber ensemble, setting blurbs from a farm-machinery catalog) and the 1957 Aspen Serenade really do belong to the same world.
Then there's the innocent, pastoral vein that he likewise could tap at any time. The first three of the exquisite, tiny Chamber Symphonies (1917-21) are like that, and yet La Cheminée du roi René, two decades after, is in the same place. It's a delight in tunes that has nothing particular to do with pastiche and yet lends itself easily to pieces that actually are pastiches, like the Suite d'après Corrette for wind trio, or the first Viola Sonata ("on anonymous 18th-century themes").

Are the strains incompatible? Milhaud himself proved quite pedantically that they aren't, by writing two string quartets (Nos. 14 and 15) that can be played separately or together, as an octet. Individually they are spare, elegant, harmonically mild pieces, maybe a little suspiciously thin in texture. Together they are, in the exact sense, a joyful noise.
The BluePrint Festival's two Milhaud programs were brilliantly chosen in two ways. The Milhaud on them was music almost entirely unknown — that Aspen Serenade was by far the best exposed of the pieces on the two original programs, with two recent recordings to its credit. Slated also were the violin-and-harpsichord sonata, the Fourth Quintet (string quintet, with two cellos), the Suite de Sonnets for vocal quartet and chamber ensemble, the a cappella Cantate de la guerre, and the Cantate pour l'inauguration du Musée de l'Homme, for vocal quartet, chorus, and a nervy chamber ensemble including a tenor sax.
This is not music you get to hear every day, or indeed every decade. Even given that the quintet was cut without explanation, the violin-and-harpsichord sonata replaced with the much more familiar Cheminée du roi René for woodwind quintet, and the Sonnets with the equally unknown Amours de Ronsard, it was still more unfamiliar Milhaud than the average concertgoer would hear in a very long time. And it covered every base: there was the suave and easy Milhaud in the wind quintet; the feisty and obstreperous Milhaud in the Aspen Serenade; Milhaud trying to be direct and passionate in the 1940 Cantate de la guerre, written scant months before the Jewish composer had to flee France; Milhaud, a few years earlier, setting a preposterous text about the Ascent of Man with such craft that even a line like:

Rron rara rron ff flon mon ma ma ann moa a na zza

generates a fearful sound from the chorus.
As for Les amours de Ronsard, for nine instruments and vocal quartet: now that is a piece that deserves a future. It's rich and lyrical and blithe and irresistibly happy. I defy anyone to resist the rhythmic games in "L'Aubépin" (The Hawthorne). They're a pleasure so entirely natural that you hesitate even to look at them closely for fear of breaking the spell.
But Milhaud was only about half the music on the two programs. The other half was music of his students, and I don't think any teacher could but be proud of the quality and individuality of the music. At noon, Elinor Armer (a Milhaud student) led off the program with an affectionate performance of fellow-student William Bolcom's familiar Graceful Ghost Rag. Then Jean-Michel Fonteneau in William O. Smith's solo-cello C.B. from 1972, a piece that begins with a pun (the first notes are, naturally, C and B) and gets sillier from there; I think one would have to have seen Fonteneau's genially blissful attitude playing more, er, conventional music to appreciate fully the way he whistled, sang, moaned, sighed, and otherwise vocalized his way through the piece.
Then Richard Felciano's 1993 Cante Jondo for clarinet, bassoon, and piano — striking and struck through with dark colors, the bassoon and clarinet almost always moving together, and the clarinet staying low. An arresting piece. And then, in the evening, the premiere, Elinor Armer's API, for violin (Bettina Mussumeli), viola (Jodi Levitz), and percussion (Matt Cannon, exuberantly playing an array of instruments I've not seen outside a percussion concerto — half of Old First's stage was occupied). The piece is about bees, with a very realistic swarm, a stylized dance for the Queen (something like a tango crossed with a sarabande), and at the end a "Bee in Amber," static and beautiful.
You could get a lot more variety even than that in a collection of Milhaud's students. (Burt Bacharach and Dave Brubeck are two more of them.) But the theme would be the same — enjoy life, enjoy music.

(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)

©2003 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved