|
CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW A Gallic Pot Pourri October 20, 2002
|
By Sarah Cahill
Like Domenico Scarlatti and Alan Hovhaness, Darius Milhaud was prolific
enough to be suspected of superficiality. How could a piece really be that
good when its opus number is 366? One benefit of his voluminous output,
though, is that Mills College (where the composer taught from 1940 to 1971)
presents all-Milhaud concerts year after year with virtually no repeats,
juxtaposing the best-known works like Creation du Monde (1923) with
curiosities like Segoviana (1957).
Performances by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players during this
special sesquicentennial concert ranged from breathtakingly brilliant to
uncharacteristically listless. Conductor Jean-Louis LeRoux prefaced Aspen
Serenade from 1957 with a self-congratulatory reminiscence about an ailing
Darius Milhaud at Mills handing LeRoux his baton with the words "You conduct
from now on." But whether it was inadequate rehearsal time or LeRoux's
passive direction of the group, neither Aspen Serenade nor Creation du
Monde, the two large ensemble pieces on the program, really sprang to life.
As David Bernstein pointed out in his excellent program notes, Aspen
Serenade explores both harmonic and contrapuntal polytonality,
superimposing
melodies in different keys and pitting, for instance, a group of winds in
E-flat major and 6/8 time against a group of strings in C major playing in
2/4 time. The musicians still seemed to be in the early stages of learning
this piece. The music's voluptuous melodies, its interlocking voices, and
its asymmetrical rhythms remained unexpressed. Milhaud gave each of the five
movements a contrasting mood, their titles' first letters forming the
acrostic for "Aspen:" Animé, Souple, Plaisible, Energique, Nerveux. But
they all blurred together in a moderate mezzo-forte polytonal soup.
It's hard to go wrong with La Creation du monde, Milhaud's shimmying, sensuous evocation of Harlem jazz bands. Ideally, even the squarest of classical musicians should be able to swing into that jazzy atmosphere that Milhaud heard in the early 20s, but only a few of the Contemporary Music Players were up to the task: saxophonist David Henderson, cellist Stephen Harrison, and percussionist William Winant, rapping rim shots with a traps set. Otherwise the tempos dragged, syncopations plodded, and LeRoux's leadership could easily have been fulfilled by a metronome. In 1911, after the nineteen-year-old Milhaud had completed his Sonata for Violin and Piano, op. 3, his teacher exclaimed "Why have you used D-sharp seventeen times on the first page? You don't know how to construct a melody." On the contrary, Milhaud was a master tunesmith from an early age. Violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg delivered a sensational performance, allowing the luscious lines plenty of breathing room. Steinberg nimbly negotiated the accumulated heaps of virtuosic passagework, while Abel stretched and pulled his soaring lines and still maintained the intensity of forward motion, two hallmarks of fin-de-siècle opulence which are hard to manage simultaneously. Together, Abel and Steinberg conjured up the exuberant, larger-than-life confidence of the teenage Milhaud. A stark contrast to this performance was another duo, the 1941 Sonatina for violin and viola, in which violinist Roy Malan and violist Nancy Ellis sight-read their way through the score with painful intonation problems.
While it's educational to hear a lot of Milhaud in one afternoon, not all the music is first-rate. Guitarist Paul Binkley gave an eloquent and impressive reading of Segoviana from 1951, but the short piece is so strange and erratic, like scattered mismatched shards of pottery, that it's clear why Segovia never performed it even though he commissioned it. Abel also teamed up with soprano Sara Ganz for Quatre poèmes de Catulle from 1923. Here again was a perfect, intimate exchange of interpretations. Both musicians are great communicators, and Ganz particularly had a lot of fun portraying the spiciness of these sensual poems. Her clear diction matched Abel's distinctive style, investing each song with a unique personality. They proved that a truly expressive performance can make all the difference.
(Sarah Cahill is a pianist and music critic in the Bay Area.)
|
