GREAT RECORDINGS phase 15

MILHAUD: LA CRÉATION DU MONDE
LE BŒUF SUR LE TOIT · SAUDADES DO BRASIL
Orchestre National de France/Leonard Bernstein
The Concert Arts Orchestra/Darius Milhaud

3 45808 2
(Angel: 3 45809 2)
Recorded: 1976 & 1956
Stereo/ADD
67 minutes

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Bernstein’s performances of Milhaud are full of affection and his French orchestra is easy-going in style and silky in sound. The coupling is Milhaud’s joyful 1956 recording of the complete Saudades do Brasil, of which Bernstein recorded only four dances.’
(The Gramophone)
Award: Diapason d’Or, France

Two of the works on this CD draw on the sights and sounds of Brazil, where Milhaud went in 1917, aged 25, to serve as an attaché to his friend Paul Claudel, who had been appointed French Ambassador in Rio de Janeiro. Le Bœuf sur le toit (1919) is musically a Brazilian pot-pourri, with a rondo theme based on a popular tango called ‘The Ox on the Roof’. Jean Cocteau persuaded Milhaud to use the score as part of a stage ‘spectacle’, set in a New York bar, with a crazy scenario devised by Cocteau himself.

Saudades do Brasil is a collection of 12 evocative and affectionate ‘snapshots’ of locations in Rio, written in 1920–21, first for piano and then orchestrated. Bernstein had room on his 1976 LP for only four of these dances, but twenty years earlier in Hollywood the composer himself had recorded the complete suite with a smaller orchestra (of top players from the film studios) and this ‘joyful’ performance makes a particularly appropriate coupling on this new CD.

Though Milhaud first heard jazz in London in 1920, he was bowled over by the black jazz he heard in Harlem during a visit to New York in 1922. Like the popular dances from South America, this ethnic music from the North had a profound effect on the composer. In the ballet La Création du monde (1923), he fused jazz and classical elements to create one of the 20th century’s most original and abidingly popular orchestral scores.

Of course, Leonard Bernstein, himself a master of musical diversity, is the ideal interpreter of these colourful and exotic scores. With the help of a superb French orchestra, Bernstein’s performances are stylish, brilliant and ‘full of affection’.