MUSICAL OPINION:
Most of these historic recordings come from a Nixa LP, the others from various LP and 78 sources. The transfers have been particularly well remastered by Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio, but Stephen Sutton of Divine Art has been the guiding hand behind this very welcome and well-filled CD. He also provides very good Booklet Notes. The outstanding performance of the enormously impressive Second Symphonic Suite, for large orchestra, under Monteux was only issued in the UK on an old RCA Camden LP and I do not think the work has had another recording, The Suite from the opera Maximilien is also an only recording, making this collection extremely valuable for collectors and students of this composer. Older readers may well recall the single side of a 10-inch 78rpm in the Columbia History of Music from the mid-1030s, under Walter Goehr, with a clutch of five soloists making up the miniature orchestra to play this miniature Symphony; the three movement work lasts just 3’10” overall! The Five Studies was, I believe, Paul Badura-Skoda’s first recording, so there is much of importance in this CD. Strongly recommended.
Robert Matthew-Walker

THE GRAMOPHONE:
Nothing oddball about the chosen tempi in a fascinating and valuable collection of works by Milhaud in old recordings, some of them genuinely historic and all very nicely transferred by Divine Art. Good, too, to hear Walter Goehr’s 1936 recording of the three-minute Little Symphony of 1926 and Monteux’s 1945 Protée Symphonic Suite with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. I enjoyed a sequence with the Vienna Symphony under Henry Swoboda (someone who deserves a revival in his own right), especially the dramatic Suite from Milhaud’s opera Maximilien. Useful notes, and at 79’28”, a generous programme, well worth investigating.
Rob Cowan

INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW:
The Suite, Op. 152 for violin, clarinet and piano is one of Milhaud’s happiest lighter works and a rare 1952 French recording of it by Jacques Parrenin, Ulysse Delécluse and Annette Haas-Hamburger opens an excellent Milhaud anthology on Divine Art. It is followed by the Second Suite for Protée, played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Monteux; the 1945 recording comes up marvellously in this transfer. Walter Goehr conducted a 1936 recording of the Little Symphony no. 3, Op. 71 with a line-up of London’s finest musicians of the time, including Jean Pougnet and Reginald Kell. The remaining items here are with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Henry Swoboda: the Serenade for Orchestra, Op. 62’ the Suite from Maximilien, Op. 110b; Trois Rag Caprices, Op. 78; and the Five Studies for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 63, in which the soloist is Paul Badura-Skoda. This is an imaginative collection in superbly restored sound.
Nigel Simeone

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE:
Darius Milhaud did most of his creative work in the 1920s and 30s; he enjoyed a modicum of fame in the 1940s and 50s when modernist works were ubiquitous on concert programs in Europe and America. He was a sort of Gallic Hindemith, vastly prolific in genres large and small, given to rhythmic complexity and mixtures of sweet and sour tonality pleasing to the modernist palate. Where Hindemith might look to history for inspiration, Milhaud favored cultural eclecticism. The jazz and Latin rhythms that were so avant-garde in the 1920s now seem utterly charming. While he left no great work to perpetuate his memory, Milhaud was a skilful and pleasing composer well worth recovering on record.

Milhaud’s oeuvre was once very well represented on records, though most had a fleeting life in the catalogs. While his own performances are reissued from time to time, much has languished in the archives for half a century and more. This collection of less familiar works is welcome.

The Suite for Violin, Clarinet and Piano is a disarmingly simple neoclassical confection enlivened by spicy French tonalities delivered here with pleasing grace; the recording derives from an old Period LP. The Little Chamber Symphony was issued as part of a multi-volume history of music project issued on Columbia 78’s: “little” is the operative word, since its three movements take about a minute each. The Serenade for Orchestra, Etudes for Piano and Orchestra, Maximilian Suite, and Rag Caprices all derive from an early Westminster LP. If there is nothing particularly memorable here, there is much that is enjoyable. One wishes that Westminster had hired French musicians rather than a Viennese recording ensemble, but Swoboda and company sound well-rehearsed and very competent.

But the compelling reason to purchase the disc is the Protée Suite performed by the San Francisco Symphony and Pierre Monteux. It is an early work (1919), and Milhaud was still assimilating Debussy and Stravinsky. It is unusual to hear him working with a large orchestra and striving for sublimity rather than wit – and unusual too to hear his music performed by a major conductor. If the results are not equal to La Mer or The Rite of Spring, it is not for want of striving on the part of composer or conductor. The Suite is Picasso-esque in its randy celebration of pagan sexuality, full of throbbing ostinatos, braying horns, and shrilling fifes. The theme of mutability was congenial to Milhaud, who must have regarded himself as a sort of musical Proteus.

Monteux is an ideal interpreter; one can only wish that he had waited a little longer to record a work that requires more dynamic range than could be managed in 1945. While it made a brief appearance in LP, this is one of the scarcest of Monteux’s recordings, despite the conductor’s important association with Paris modernism. One enjoys Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit, but for sheer Bacchic mayhem, the Protée Suite is unsurpassed.

Divine Art is to be commended for their selection of works and the care taken with their restoration. Vast numbers of obscure modernist works were recorded in the 1940s and 50s, and while the performers are seldom familiar names today, many could be made up into attractive retrospectives like this one devoted to Milhaud.
Radcliffe

PENGUIN GUIDE TO COMPACT DISCS (YEARBOOK 2006/7):
Older admirers of the composer will remember some of the 78 r.p.m. records which formed the basis of his rather slender representation in the catalogues of the 1930s/. The Sérenade, Op. 71, with Walter Goehr conducting an eminent group of soloists including Jean Pougnet, Anthony Pini, Reginald Kell, Paul Draper and George Eskdale, was first issued in the Columbia ‘History of Music’ an, so far as we know, was never reissued on LP or CD. Monteux’s account of Protée comes from his time with the San Francisco orchestra in 1945, and the Swoboda records, made in Vienna in 19550, originally appeared on Westminster and have an authentic feel to them.
ØØØ (outstanding)
Ivan March

CLASSIC RECORD COLLECTOR:
Most of the pieces on the Milhaud disc are unavailable elsewhere. This alone makes it a very welcome offering, especially as they include two of the great scandal-provoking works of the composer’s early career, the Second Symphonic Suite and the Five Studies for piano and orchestra. Even 80 years on these are not easy listening. One hangs on to the often catchy tonal tunes while all around seems to be harmonic mayhem- it is not, of course, but there are moments when one has to sympathise with Saint-Saëns’s view that “several instruments playing in different keys have never produced music, merely a racket”. For me most of the extracts from the opera Maximilien come under this heading. The suite, op. 157b, on the other hand, is utterly delightful, with particularly fine clarinet playing from Ulysse Délécluse, while Pierre Monteux directs a splendidly vigorous performance of the Second Symphonic Suite, braying horns and all. There are good notes by Stephen Sutton, and Andrew Rose’s concerns over matching shellac and vinyl originals are quite without foundation: he has done an excellent job.
Roger Nichols

MUSICWEB:
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 no-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

FANFARE (USA):
Before I start reviewing this CD, an apology and an explanation. I would never, under normal circumstances, review any disc that is not available for sale in the U.S.A. I hesitated to review it, but gave in when I heard the quality of the music and of the performances. Also, of the various works here, only the first and last are currently available on CD in alternate versions. The Symphonic Suite No. 2 was last available on an independent CD produced by Innovative Music Productions but now out of print, and the Serenade for Orchestra, Five Etudes for Piano and Orchestra, and the Suite from Maximillian were not available in any incarnation I could find.

The recordings presented here range in date from 1936 to 1952 and were recorded—sadly for our availability options in the U.S.—mostly for American labels, the lone exception being the Little Chamber Symphony No. 3 which was made for British Columbia. The op. 157b was recorded for Period Records, the last four works for Westminster in 1950, and worst of all from a copyright-infringement standpoint, the Symphonic Suite No. 2 for RCA Victor. I think it is a crying shame that important and valuable classical recordings that barely sold enough copies to break even in the first place should be tossed onto the pile of the Elvis Presley, Maria Callas, and Beatles recordings that the new 75-year copyright law actually seeks to protect.

In case you have trouble deciphering my split credits above (I know I would!), op. 157b is performed by the trio of Parrenin, Delécluse, and Haas-Hamburger; op. 57 performed by the SF Symphony conducted by Monteux; op. 71 by the quintet of Pougnet, Pini, Kell, Draper, and Eskdale conducted by Goehr; and the rest by the Vienna Symphony conducted by Swoboda, with Badura-Skoda guesting on the op. 63. Pristine Audio’s restorations are, as usual, highly musical and aurally full-toned. Mr. Rose states that he had the most trouble with the Trio Suite, which is the most recent of these recordings. Apparently, Period’s inexpensive mike setup resulted in some intermodular distortion between the violin and clarinet. I can hear how this was so, especially since Milhaud wrote for these instruments to play in unison with their sounds an octave apart, but the result reveals a performance of wonderful spirit and superb interplay between the three instruments.

I must admit to not having heard any of this music prior to auditioning this CD, but of falling in love with all of it. Milhaud had that rarest of combinations for a French composer, the usual Gallic elegance tempered with Teutonic complexity and drama. From his earliest years as a known composer he was fascinated with American jazz of the early period, particularly with its superimposition of syncopated melodies and improvisations “on a bass of austere regularity.” We tend to forget nowadays that the majority of early jazz musicians preferred the kind of solid, unvarying four-four beat that later loosened up and became as rhythmically fluid as the improvisations above it, and although Milhaud was not to hear true jazz for some years—his early exposures were all to white copycats who had very little idea of how to swing—he intuitively grasped the true nature of the music, far better, in fact, than Stravinsky—who in the late 1920s had access to authentic sources. (Ravel also had access to authentic sources, and he responded with music of much greater subtlety and refinement than Milhaud’s but not with as much excitement.)

The op. 157b Suite, composed in 1936, is the most mature music on the disc. It is atypical of Milhaud in that it is fairly simple and straightforward, much like the music of Poulenc. The tempo of the Ouverture seems, to my ears, to be a sort of irregularly syncopated 6/8 meter, with the accented beats changing every few bars. “Divertissement” is a lullaby that starts out for violin and clarinet only, with piano joining in after the exposition is full and complete. This second section is a different theme, and though the music is tonal, and attractive, these melodies seem somehow elusive, not easy for the mind to grasp. The development of the A theme is played by the piano with violin and clarinet playing whole notes in thirds and fourths. The third movement, “Jeu,” is almost a folk dance played without the piano at all. The last movement, “Introduction and Finale,” is a set piece in itself that could be played alone, the somber, serious opening giving way to a joyful, swinging 6/8 piece in syncopated rhythm that could easily be a cabaret song if its melody were not so elusive and its harmonies not so complex. The trio of Parrenin, Delécluse, and Haas-Hamburger play with both delicacy and verve.

The Symphonic Suite grew from a few incidental pieces that Milhaud wrote for the satirical drama Protée by his friend Paul Claudel. In 1919 he was asked to develop the music, add more pieces, and use a large orchestra. This Ouverture is far more powerful and less playful than that of the trio suite, building from a quiet sonority of flute over low brasses a swaggering habanera rhythm to climaxes powered by the basses, low brass, and timpani in tango rhythm. A more straightforward 4/4 interlude is again interrupted by the habanera, which becomes ever more violent in tone and ominous in feeling. Trumpets in triplets and trilling flutes lead to a churning, muscular passage before the quiet ending. The Prelude and Fugue again builds from a position of quietude through the strings to the brass section, playing quite excitedly while the rest of the orchestra provides a backdrop. I may be totally off-base here, but I hear in this music and its orchestration a very similar aesthetic to that used around the time of this recording (1945) by the Stan Kenton orchestra. The following Pastorale is also restless, the Latin syncopated rhythms maintaining a churning undercurrent of unease even as the strings try to play lyrically, eventually erupting yet again in a sort of tango-habanera, with very eerie effects created by the orchestration of muted trumpets against a repeated figure played by winds scored in seconds. An agitated double-time passage leads us back to the restless “pastorale” theme, which is again interrupted by brass outbursts. Every attempt to instill a pastoral mood is thwarted by tension and unease. By contrast, the nocturne is gentle and placid, with only a small hint of the unease that pervades the other movements. The finale returns us to the drama of the other movements, yet there seems to be a more positive tone to the music, more exultant than ominous despite its various bitonal passages. The performance given here by Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony seems to my mind ideal, emphasizing structure and clarity in addition to a wonderful palette of moods and colors.

By contrast, the Little Symphony No. 3 is a quite whimsical work, using a quintet like a chamber orchestra. The language here is extremely compact, a Francophile answer to Webern. This particular performance was included in a 78-rpm set issued by EMI as the “Columbia History of Music by Ear and Eye,” and is conducted with appropriate Gallic lightness by Walter Goehr. The op. 62 Serenade for full orchestra sounds like a slightly expanded relative of the op. 71, though since it was written first the opposite is probably true. The largely ignored Henry Swoboda gives us an elegant, well-thought-out performance.

I’m thinking that the four works conducted by Swoboda probably filled out the entire LP disc originally issued on Westminster WL5051; if so, I am glad to have them all available here. Pianist Paul Badura-Skoda makes a guest appearance in the Five Etudes, op. 63, and his playing, typically incisive if lacking in force, blends nicely into the orchestral fabric. This music, despite using a full orchestra, is in some ways even less full-sounding than the Serenade, particularly in the graceful second movement, marked Doucement. The third movement, titled Fugues: Vif et rythme, is a fugue in A for the woodwinds superimposed with a three-part fugue in D♭ for the brass, a four-part fugue in F for the strings, and a fugue with a subject combining the notes of all three tonalities in the piano. The fourth movement, written in a dense atonal style, is a musical palindrome, the first 20 bars written backwards note for note and using the same instrumentation. “Sombre” is its title, and somber it is—perhaps even a little sour. By contrast the last movement, “Romantique: trés animé,” sounds light and airy, even playful, though contrasting tonality is again heard.

The suite from Milhaud’s opera Maximilien is in the same vein. The opera from which it is drawn was a disaster when it premiered at the Paris Opèra in 1932, the rich complexity of its score deemed totally inappropriate for an opera. Perhaps that is so; I have never heard it; but the suite is fascinating and delightful. Maybe it’s just me, but I find Swoboda’s conducting underpowered for this music. He made me wish that Monteux were back at the helm, yet there is no denying that he gives us a good rendering of the score. Despite the delight that I experienced from listening, I felt that I was missing a dimension of energy, and emotional involvement, that Milhaud of all French composers seems to warrant.

By contrast, the Trois Rag Caprices are rhythmically more incisive performances that still have Gallic elegance and flow. The first movement, marked “dry and robust,” whimsically presents music that is energetic yet polytonal. The “Romance” is quite lovely if typically elusive, opening with the flute and truly romantic harmonies. This entire piece seems to me about as far from ragtime as you are likely to get, and even imagining a more robust performance I find it hard to believe that this piece can “rag.” Conversely, the last movement, précis et nerveux , combines the energy of ragtime with the elegance of a waltz—a typically odd Milhaud combination. After a fairly straightforward opening, additional keys and rhythms come in that lead the music to a sort of polyrhythmic, polytonal ragtime dance.