Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!

 I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Darius Milhaud: Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère; The Household Muse

This was one of the first albums from the Juilliard String Quartet recorded by Columbia; it was released in June of 1950. It contains two works by Darius Milhaud with a special authenticity: the Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère is narrated by Madeleine Milhaud, Darius's wife, and conducted by the composer. The Household Muse for solo piano was played by Milhaud himself.

I'm trying to put myself in the position of someone listening to this LP at his or her grammophone back in 1950. This was contemporary music in the sense that Milhaud was still alive; the Cantata was written in 1938, while the piano work was only five years old. And it might have sounded "modern" to some ears, though Milhaud's most challenging modernist phase was well in the past by then. I wonder if it would have seemed fresh and new in 1950, or merely old-fashioned and a bit sentimental. I love this music so much, but it's hardly leading edge. The performers sell this in just the right way: sentimental, but not mawkish, homespun but with the numinous power of the household gods of ancient Rome:

"A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines."

- Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

I guess I have something of the same feeling myself when it comes to this music. The Deity is in the LP itself, somehow. The record album is a "homely little shrine", even more a fetish object today than it was 70 years ago. That's why I'm not listening to this Juilliard String Quartet set streamed on Spotify, but on these CDs stamped with the sacred marks of the Long-Playing Record of 1950.

Speaking of sacred marks, the beautiful album cover design isn't credited, but I'm fairly confident that it's by Darrill Connelly. He did the covers for the three Bartok albums that were released immediately after this record. 

 

 

Precision, style and passion

Milhaud: String Trio, Sonatine a Trois; Martinu: String Trios no. 1 & 2

Darius Milhaud and Bohuslav Martinu have the same approach to chamber music as Heitor Villa-Lobos: folklore provides the raw material, while popular music influences and 1920s Parisian modernism add spice, but all three set their music within the classical and pre-classical models of Haydn and Bach. The fine musicians of the Berlin-based Jacques Thibaud String Trio have their antennae up for all of these nuances of musical style, and provide an integrated experience in which passion is as important as precision and style. I've been listening to a string of String Trios lately. There's something about leaving the second violin behind that opens up many composers - Schoenberg, Roussel, Gideon Klein and Villa-Lobos are some I'm thinking of besides Milhaud and Martinu - to open, honest emotion, leaving behind theatrics and sentimentality. This is a perfectly balanced project, a disc filled with amazing music by a special group of musicians.

The healing and inspirational power of music

BBC Radio 3 has a great program called Through the Night which begins every day after midnight (12:30 on weekdays, 1 am on weekends), running, well, through the night. They play great music from recorded concerts, mainly from Europe, and for some reason the playlist nearly always includes music I enjoy listening to. The theme for the program is one that I've always loved; it's the hauntingly beautiful Madrigal Nocturne from Darius Milhaud's Cheminee du Roi suite. This CD isn't up yet on Spotify, so I'll post this version by the Athena Ensemble so you can listen while you read the rest of this review:



Isn't that lovely? And so sad. I always think of insomniacs and shut-ins being comforted by the music. It sets the stage so beautifully for the healing and inspirational power of music to follow, even here on Canada's west coast, where Through the Night begins at 4:30 in the afternoon.

The Warsaw-based Gruppo di Tempera is made up of a wind quintet (flute, clarinet, oboe, horn and bassoon) plus piano. They've put together a great program of French music that often partakes of the Madrigal Nocturne's nostalgically sad but hopeful sound, but then, in the French way, quickly changes in turn to satire, mock pomp and ceremony, and sheer nervous energy. This Dux CD, due to be released on Amazon on March 11, 2016, is recommended for its cleverly designed program, the ebullience of the playing and the clarity of the sound.

An important recording of a modernist landmark

From October 23, 2014:

The new Milhaud set from Naxos brings together for the first time on CD the three parts of the Oresteia of Aeschylus - L’Agamemnon, Les Choephores and Les Eumenides - that the composer wrote in France and Brazil between 1913 and 1923. The music, especially the larger final section, is a landmark of modernism in terms of tonality, harmony and rhythm, with innovative orchestration and connections to the syncretistic popular and folk music of the New World. Music Director and Conductor Kenneth Kiesler brings together a huge force - the University of Michigan Symphony, the UofM Percussion Ensemble, and no less than four choirs - with a total of 444 musicians, by my count from the liner notes listing.

In 1917 Milhaud began a diplomatic mission to Brazil, where he was assistant to the French consul Paul Claudel (who wrote the text for these works). Les Eumenides was the first work Milhaud began to write upon his arrival in Rio de Janeiro, and you can tell by the polytonality and complex rhythms that Milhaud was paying attention to the music he heard in the streets and his jaunts into the countryside. The work also shows, perhaps, the influence of Milhaud’s new friend Villa-Lobos, who by 1917 had written music like the complex, sprawling Amazonas (though Milhaud wouldn’t have heard that work until its premiere later in the 1920s in Paris).

This project is very highly recommended for all lovers of innovative music, and especially for aficionados of percussion and odd instrumentation. Here is your chance to hear orchestral music with parts written for 15 percussionists plus quartets of saxophones and saxhorns! Naxos wins again by bringing to light a major work that has never before been recorded.