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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Revisiting, And Rethinking, Les Six
September 14, 2001
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By Robert Commanday
It was like taking two steps back in time at the Mills College Concert Hall Friday, in fifty and sixty-five year jumps. In the fifties, concerts like Friday's "Darius Milhaud and Les Six" took place with delightful regularity, Milhaud at the center of an admiring circle of the very talented students who surrounded him along with those from UC Berkeley and other schools in the area, and the music-lovers knowing that this was something special, great celebratory events. And it was in the thirties that this repertory was really a good part of the modern music.
The modernity has long since worn off, but the freshness and individuality of some of this stuff is still there. Although the event was centered on Milhaud, underwritten by the Mills Class of 1945 Darius Milhaud Performance Endowment, his colleague Francis Poulenc's Sextet for Piano and Winds upstaged him. It was a little unfair. The Sextet (1939) is among Poulenc's finest works, whereas Milhaud's strongest pieces call for more resources than were available. The Sextet has a vitality and complexity that skim past the smart-aleck boulevardier and other satiric poses which he so regularly struck. Even the mask behind which he tried, like Stravinsky, to pretend that the sentimentality was just a joke, was transparent; his feelings sounded real. The contrasts in texture, idea, expression, the unexpected melodic turns, the flashing shifts in the voicings that capitalize on the woodwind quintet sonorities, the unerring harmonic control and the daring in structure are not short of brilliant.
Curiously, the most impressive of the three Milhaud works was the earliest and the one that sounded the least like him, the Sonate for flute, oboe, clarinet and piano. It was composed when he was 26, during his extended sojourn in Brazil. The rich and sensuous textures, rhythms, and harmonies are there, the polytonality typical of his music from there, and also qualities that you could believe Gershwin had picked up on 15 years later. At the same time, the Sonate has a darkness — "lugubrious," a friend commented — not often encountered in his music.
The more customary suave and charming Milhaud came through in his popular woodwind quintet, La Cheminée du Roi René (1939), named after the resting spot of a 15th century king, actually near Milhaud's birthplace in Aix-en-Provence, The titles and character of its seven movements portray episodes at the King's troubadour court there, and their themes come from a joint film score to which Milhaud contributed. La Cheminée is a charmer, the movements short but telling, capped by the rich "La Maosinglade" at the center, surrounded by the light and evanescent, the lyrical. He gave each movement a pointed touch, and a concluding wink, nod, sigh, or jab. The program also included Milhaud's popular Sonatine for flute and piano, in a graceful performance by the flutist Priscilla Call Essert who served well in the other instrumental works, and the fine pianist Kristin Pankonin, who was also excellent in the Poulenc and the Milhaud quartet described above. The excellent performers in the ensembles, in addition to Essert, were Peter Lemberg, oboe, Arthur Austin, clarinet, Alicia Telford, horn and, stepping in as a first-rate substitute for the originally scheduled bassoonist, Rufus Olivier.
Arthur Honegger was represented with five elegant songs in the set, Petit Cours de morale ("A Small Course in Morals"), to poems by Jean Giraudoux (a contemporary of Les Six). The music is as pointed and trenchant as the brief, keen and ironic texts. The singer's lines are subtle and the soprano Sara Ganz discovered to her audience every nuance and turn in a performance as sophisticated as Honegger's rendering, supported finely by the pianist Belle Bullwinkle. Ganz and Bullwinkle also presented a song set by the female member of Les Six, Germaine Tailleferre. Her Six Chansons françaises, based on ironic texts from the 18th (Lataignant and Voltaire), 17th (Sarasin) and 15th centuries, have a witty sardonic and sharply feminist twist that Ganz made the most of. The vocal parts are persuasive, while the accompaniment is undistinguished, consisting of empty or mechanical figuration which might have been better served had Bullwinkle played it down, played it for sheen and pastel coloring. Aside from the pleasure of hearing the up-front feminism of the longest surviving member of the group (Tailleferre died in 1983 at 90), this set and the little else of her music that is performed hardly justifies her being grouped with Milhaud, Poulenc and Honegger, and never mind Georges Auric and Louis Durey. But for a chance notion of a critic, history would have remembered Les Trois or possibly Les Trois et cie. Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. ©2001 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved |